Psychtoolbox interfaces between Matlab or Octave and the computer hardware. The
PTB core routines provide high performance 2D and 3D graphics with the highest
color and luminance precision, timing precision and control. This both on standard
displays, as well as with special visual stimulators, and with High Dynamic Range
displays, and with a wide variety of Virtual/Augmented Reality devices. They expose
raw OpenGL commands, support video playback and capture, as well as low-latency
precisely timed audio playback and capture. They facilitate the collection of observer
responses with high timing precision via various input modalities like keyboard, mouse,
game controllers, multi-touch touch screens, response boxes, gaze trackers, and digital /
analog i/o equipment. Ancillary helper routines support common needs like color space
transformations, calibration, and psychometric procedures like, e.g., the QUEST threshold
seeking algorithm and others.
Various 3rd party frameworks and higher level toolboxes are built on top of Psychtoolbox
to make implementation of research data collection especially easy in specific sub-domains
of neuroscience. For beginners or certain domains there also exist user friendly 3rd party
graphical user interfaces, e.g., PsyBuilder.
You can also run some of your Psychtoolbox studies online, via VPixx Labmaestro service under
https://vpixx.com/products/labmaestro-packngo.
Psychtoolbox has many active users, an active forum, and is widely
cited. The current version supports at least Matlab R2024a on Linux, Windows
and macOS, and Octave 5 and later on Linux, and Octave 7.3 on Windows, and Octave 9 on macOS.
Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 update “Sommerloch” was released at 11th August 2024.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.14”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.14
Highlights:
All:
-
Screen('DrawDots'): Only apply a margin to non-square dot types.
Only round dots get trimmed in the fragment shader, and so dot_type=4
was left with too much padding from the vertex shader. Bug fix contributed
by Alex Forrence @aforren1
-
Python extensions built from this release onwards should also work with
NumPy 2.x in addition to NumPy 1.x. Changes contributed by Eric Larson.
Linux:
-
Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024a.
-
Undo Screen('OpenMovie') compatibility fix for Ubuntu 24.04-LTS, of
using pipewiresink as audio sink. While this does fix the pulseaudio bugs
of delayed playback (see Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.12), the pipewiresink plugin
itself, as shipping in Ubuntu 24.04-LTS / GStreamer 1.24, has its own bugs,
which are worse and impact more frequent use cases, e.g., seeking, change
of playback speed, reverse playback, and instabilities or hangs at end of
playback for some common movies. Iow. use of pipewiresink causes regressions.
See forum bug report here:
https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/10-second-delay-with-with-gst-state-change-async/3924
GStreamer folks know about the problem but there ain’t a solution yet.
As of this release, the pipewiresink can still be used as an active opt-in,
accepting other potential types of audio playback problems, and if opted in,
should fix the following issue on Ubuntu 24.04-LTS and later, and other
distributions that use Pipewire as desktop sound server and have an outdated
buggy Pulseaudio 16 installation, instead of the more recent Pulseaudio 17.
See the following issue for this bug, which is luckily not encountered often:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/issues/814
On unfixed affected systems (mostly Ubuntu 22.04-LTS), if there is
a notable time delay between Screen('OpenMovie') and start of
video+audio playback via Screen('PlayMovie'), then the movie
playback will freeze after displaying the 1st video frame for the
duration of that delay between OpenMovie and PlayMovie, then
continue. Problem didn’t exist in earler Linux distributions like
Ubuntu 20.04-LTS and is fixed by this bug fix for later distros like
Ubuntu 24.04-LTS from April 2024.
The use of pipewiresink can be enforced as workaround by specifying the
following string as ‘movieoptions’ parameter in Screen('Openmovie', ...);
‘AudioSink=pipewiresink’.
-
RaspberryPi now also allows GetSecs clock selection, like the Intel
variants do since a few releases.
Windows:
macOS:
-
Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024a and against
Octave 9.2 from HomeBrew.
-
SetupPsychtoolbox(): Try to fix it properly for macOS with xattr calls.
Skip xattr calls for .mltbx installed files via Matlab Add-On explorer,
as those already have their quarantine flags removed.
For other (zip file) install locations, handle blanks/spaces in the
installation path.
Also some output text cleanups and fixes. Tested with .mltbx and zip file
path install on path with spaces etc. Lets hope this goes better.
Enjoy!
Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 update “Stupido” was released at 7th June 2024.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.13”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.13
This is a bug fix release for macOS only.
macOS:
- Fix broken SetupPsychtoolbox().
Enjoy!
Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 update “Scraps” was released at 5th June 2024.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.12”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.12
Some of this Psychtoolbox release was sponsored by Mathworks under the year
2023/2024 contract..
Highlights:
- None. Just some small fixups for improved Ubuntu 24.04-LTS and Matlab R2024a
compatibility.
All:
Linux:
-
Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024a.
-
PsychLinuxConfiguration: Quote paths, to improve MLTBX compatibility.
-
PsychLinuxConfiguration(): Add users also to ‘gamemode’ group.
This provides additional permissions to the gamemoded running on behalf
of the user, to execute additional performance optimizations as part
of Priority(n) with n > 0. Needed on at least Ubuntu 24.04-LTS and later.
-
Screen('OpenMovie'): On Linux, use pipewiresink as audio sink if
available. Should fix the following issue on Ubuntu 24.04-LTS and later,
and other distributions that use Pipewire as desktop sound server and
have an outdated buggy Pulseaudio 16 installation, instead of the more
recent Pulseaudio 17. The bug can’t be fixed on Ubuntu 22.04-LTS without
manual user workarounds. See following issue for this bug, which is
likely not encountered often:
https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/issues/814
On unfixed affected systems (mostly Ubuntu 22.04-LTS), if there is
a notable time delay between Screen('OpenMovie') and start of
video+audio playback via Screen('PlayMovie'), then the movie
playback will freeze after displaying the 1st video frame for the
duration of that delay between OpenMovie and PlayMovie, then
continue. Problem didn’t exist in earler Linux distributions like
Ubuntu 20.04-LTS and is fixed by this bug fix for later distros like
Ubuntu 24.04-LTS from April 2024.
Windows:
- Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b.
macOS:
-
Psychtoolbox was built against Matlab R2023b and tested against
Matlab R2024a and Octave 8.4 from HomeBrew. It also works on the
new Octave 9.1 from HomeBrew
-
SetupPsychtoolbox: Quote paths, to improve MLTBX compatibility.
-
TextInOffscreenWindowTest.m: Fix it for Retina displays on macOS. Also cleanup.
-
BitsPlusPlus: Handle Apple macOS Retina displays properly for imaging pipeline validation runs.
-
ImagingStereoDemo: Handle Apple Retina displays properly during movie writing.
-
TwoStateQuery(): Add workaround for broken Matlab R2024a on Apple macOS.
Enjoy!