For details, please review the detailed change log.

The only changes in this release are performance improvements for GStreamer movie playback functionality under Linux. We now detect if the video decoder is multi-threading capable and enable multi-threaded decoding, if so. This provides some speedup, e.g., with the multi-threaded H264 decoder of the latest GStreamer versions, e.g., shipping with Ubuntu Linux 11.10. Some bits of additional performance benchmarking code for video playback was added as well.

This is mostly useful for playback of high resolution HD video (1920 x 1080p HD) at unusually high framerates (e.g., 60 fps) on powerful multi-core machines, e.g., 4 - 8 core high-end systems. Users of dual-core systems will probably not notice any difference, as the old Psychtoolbox was already able to saturate two processor cores. Also, for more usual resolutions or framerates, there probably won’t be a big benefit.

With this release, the Linux Psychtoolbox will probably significantly outperform both the OS/X and Windows Psychtoolbox for demanding video playback applications.