Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3@89ac3a06 at GitHub tag: PTB_Beta-2013-01-04\_V3.0.10

All systems:

• Support for GStreamer camerabin2 video capture & recording: Once a future release of the GStreamer-SDK catches up in functionality, this will enable video capture and recording on 64-Bit OSX and for 64-Bit Matlab on MS-Windows. Currently it only works on Linux, or for 32-Bit Matlab on Windows or for OSX either with 32-Bit Matlab or with a self-compiled GStreamer installation from Homebrew.

• Support for a new builtin imaging pipeline panel fitter: This allows to open onscreen windows whose drawing area size is bigger or smaller than the area of the screen occupied by the window. A new optional parameter clientRect for Screen('Openwindow',...); allows to specify the “virtual size” of the window, whereas the old rect parameter still specifies the true size of the window on the screen. Psychtoolbox will pretend your window is only the size of clientRect, but at Screen('Flip') time it will upscale or downscale your stimulus image to the true size of the window, applying linear or better filtering for this zoom.

  Why would you want to do that?

  Typical flat panels and projectors only work optimally at their native resolution. All other resolutions usually cause at least funny timing problems or sometimes visual artifacts with dynamic stimuli. This option allows you to transfer a script written for visual stimulation on, e.g., a CRT monitor or a panel on a certain resolution, to a different experimental setup which has a different native display resolution with minimal modifications to the script in case your script made assumptions about the display resolution in use. It would be especially useful if you worked in a place where some equipment is badly maintained and tends to break down in the middle of data collection, so it needs to be swapped with incompatible equipment of different native resolution. This release still misses the high-level setup code in PsychImaging() to access and configure this feature in convenient ways, so the panel fitter may not work well or need some tinkering when used together with some advanced features, e.g., some stereo display modes or high precision display modes which use a unusual display geometry themselves. This will be fixed in a future release. For standard bread & butter rescaling it works well. Of course it is still better to choose your resolutions wisely or write your code resolution independent if possible, as the scaling comes at some cost of another millisecond or two spent on rescaling in the gpu.

• Small fixes to PsychKinectCore and to PsychHID.

• Various other fixes for small documentation and PTB bugs.

• Potential multi-threaded decoding improvements for GStreamer movie playback. The multi-threaded high performance playback mode introduced in the previous beta is so far only effective on Linux and on the GStreamer packages provided by the Homebrew package manager on OSX, but not with the GStreamer-SDK on OSX or Windows. This beta prepares higher performance playback with a future version of the GStreamer-SDK.

• Support for a popular HDMI stereo frame packing format, side-by-side horizontally compressed stereo. PsychImaging() has a function to enable this, ImagingStereoDemo(102) demonstrates it.

• Datapixx and Eyelink improvements.

• Use of multisample anti-aliasing MSAA with imaging pipeline enabled should now work better on deficient OSX graphics drivers, especially in 3d rendering mode due to addition of new/improved error handling and fallback path.

Linux:

• Improved Linux support for timestamping, graphics problem detection and desktop compositor handling. This further increases the advantage Linux users already had over OSX and Windows users wrt. timing precision. This beta has been tested with different common desktop GUI’s for Linux wrt. to correct stimulus display, proper timing and timestamping and display synchronization across dual-display setups, e.g., for stereoscopic presentation, with a NVidia GeForce 8800 card under Ubuntu Linux 12.04.1-LTS, the latest NVidia binary drivers and a Datapixx for external measurement of stimulus onset timing and timestamping. It works perfectly well on single-display and on dual-display setups under KDE-4 with KWin desktop manager, GNOME-3/Gnome-Shell with Mutter dektop manager, LXDE with OpenBox, GNOME-2 classic without desktop compositor, and XFCE-4 with/without compositor. It works perfectly well on single display setups, but not on multi-display setups with desktop GUI’s based on Compiz: Unity and GNOME-2 work well single display but not dual-display. This must be a bug in Compiz introduced by the latest software updates to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS sometime December 2012. Canonical applied some optimizations to improve video game performance, which worked out well on single display setups, but apparently went wrong for dual-display setups. It doesn’t work well at all with the Unity-2D desktop, something is broken there. If you run data collection i would recommend running a desktop GUI without compositor, e.g., by creating a separate “experiment” user account on your machine where data collection is run and a pure 2d desktop is installed, e.g., XFCE-4 with desktop composition turned off, or LXDE+OpenBox. This gives you that extra piece of mind that even if there would be compositor related bugs in Psychtoolbox or your system, no compositor could interfere, because something that doesn’t exist can’t interfere. It may also give you a few percent extra performance. However, the desktop GUIs mentioned above are well behaved even if a compositor is active, as PTB can temporarily turn off the compositor, or the compositors switch themselves to standby during an experiment session. It’s a tradeoff you have to make between paranoia vs. convenience and bling.

• Improved workarounds for handling of slightly broken Intel-DDX graphics drivers on Linux (pre 2.20.16 series). Intel video drivers before version 2.20.16 but after June 2011 have a bug in their swap scheduling. Psychtoolbox will detect this bug and enable a workaround for such drivers since the previous beta. The detection code has been improved. Of course it is best to update to a fixed driver (v2.20.16 or later) asap.

Windows:

• Improved support for handling of MS-Windows-8 dektop compositor: Psychtoolbox is better at detecting if a desktop compositor on Windows Vista/7/8 interferes with timing and can warn you in most cases. However, Windows-8 does no longer allow to disable the compositor, neither manually by you, nor automatically by us. This means you have to completely rely on the compositor disabling itself for fullscreen window displays, something that didn’t work well at all in the past. Testing with an up to date Windows-7 system showed that the compositor now auto-disables for fullscreen windows on single-display setups, but fails miserably on multi-display setups. I didn’t test with Windows-8 as we don’t have or use that os. Maybe Windows-8 behaves better than Windows-7. If it doesn’t then it is completely unuseable for timed stimulus presentation an anything but a single display setup, with no second monitor even connected.

OSX:

• Bugfixes / Workarounds for some MS-Windows bugs and many new MacOSX 10.7+ operating system bugs. If i had to describe Apples latest operating systems in one word it would be “Dysfunctional”. Especially many fixes are related to use of high-precision display devices like Datapixx/Viewpixx/Propixx/Bits+/Bits# etc.