The first BETA “Random acts of kindness” was relased at 5th October 2014 and started the new Psychtoolbox 3.0.12 series. Now, one month later, after some stabilization and tweaking and some minor updates, and without any user complaints so far, it is about time to announce it.

As usual, the complete develoment history can be found in our GitHub repository. The release tag is “PTB_Beta-2014-11-06_V3.0.12”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/PTB_Beta-2014-11-06_V3.0.12

Changes with respect to version 3.0.11:

System and software requirements

• MS-Windows: Only 64-Bit Windows-7 is officially supported. PTB only gets (infrequently and lightly) tested with Windows-7. It should also work with 64-Bit Windows-8 and later and with 64-Bit Windows Vista and 64-Bit Windows-XP, but if you run into problems with those earlier or later systems you are on your own. Especially support for Windows-XP is expected to degrade due to lack of future testing and bug fixing. No care will be taken to prevent future development from breaking support for Windows XP or Vista.

  32-Bit versions of Windows will no longer work with Psychtoolbox 3.0.12.

• Apple OSX: 64-Bit OSX version 10.8 “Mountain Lion” and later is needed for PTB to work at all, but only OSX 10.10 “Yosemite” is officially supported. No future testing, bug fixing or troubleshooting will be performed for any version but 10.10 “Yosemite”.

• GNU/Linux: All reasonably modern versions of 32-Bit and 64-Bit Linux should work. Primary development and testing is done on Ubuntu 14.04-LTS and 14.10, and compatible flavors, e.g, KUbuntu 14.04-LTS and KUbuntu 14.10. These are the officially supported Linux distributions. GNU/Debian version 7 and upcoming version 8 are tested by the NeuroDebian team.

• Matlab: 64-Bit Matlab on Linux, OSX and Windows. Current development and testing happens with R2012a but will probably be soon completely shifted to R2014b.

  32-Bit versions of Matlab are no longer working with Psychtoolbox 3.0.12.

• GNU/Octave: On Linux, our “DownloadPsychtoolbox” installable version supports 32-Bit and 64-Bit Octave version 3.8.x for Debian and Ubuntu. On OSX, our “DownloadPsychtoolbox” installable version supports Octave 3.8.0 - 3.8.2.

  If you get your Psychtoolbox for GNU/Debian or Ubuntu from NeuroDebian’s repository then it will support whatever 32-Bit or 64-Bit version of Octave is officially shipping with your distribution - usually some Octave version between 3.4.0 and 3.8.x, depending on the age of your distribution.

  We do recommend upgrading your Linux distro to a release from the year 2014, as those will usually ship Octave 3.8 out of the box. Octve 3.8 features a Matlab like GUI for a higher level of convenience.

• GStreamer: GStreamer-0.10.x is no longer supported. You must install GStreamer version 1.4.0 or later on Windows or OSX, GStreamer version 1.0.0 or later on Linux if you want to use any multi-media functionality like Video capture, Video recording, movie writing or movie playback.

• PsychKinect support: Support for the Kinect now requires libfreenect version 0.5 or later on Linux and OSX. Suitable versions of libfreenect will be automatically provided by NeuroDebian if you install Psychtoolbox for Linux from their repository. On OSX you can get a sufficiently recent version of libfreenect from HomeBrew.

Major new features and improvements:

All operating systems:

• GStreamer 1.0 as new multi-media backend. Apart from fixing some bugs of GStreamer-0.10, this should make Psychtoolbox multi-media handling more future-proof, as GStreamer-1.x is in active development and supported, whereas GStreamer-0.10.x no longer receives and maintenance, support or bug fixes from its developers. GStreamer-1 supports more video codecs, support for deep color video formats and more efficient multi-threaded video decoding for popular formats like H264. The latter should provide performance gains on multi-core Mac OSX and Windows machines, so performance on those legacy operating systems should come a bit closer to what Linux users are enjoying since many years.

  Caveats: Video capture and recording is currently unsupported on MS-Windows due to missing video capture plugins in the current GStreamer-1.4 distribution for Windows. This will start working again when the GStreamer developers provide suitable plugins. Video capture on OSX is limited to what Apples AVFoundation and QuicktimeKit support. Specifically capture from DV camcorder cameras didn’t work at all when testing under OSX 10.9. Audio-Video sync for video recording with USB webcams under OSX 10.9 wasn’t great at all. The best video capture and recording experience is expected under Linux, just as in the past. Movie playback with some video codecs on Microsoft Windows with some Matlab versions can cause random crashes of Matlab. This has been infrequently observed during playback of H264 video, e.g., with Psychtoolbox SimpleMovieDemo. These don’t happen always and are likely due to some incompatibility between some Matlab versions and GStreamer. There are no known problems wit any movie playback on OSX or Linux.

• The PsychKinect driver now supports the XBOX Kinects and the original Kinect 1 for Windows - on Linux and OSX. Kinect for Windows is not supported on MS-Windows. Kinect 2 is not supported at all at the moment. The driver can handle multiple simultaneous Kinects.

• Stereo crosstalk reduction support, especially for frame sequential stereo modes by Diederick. Useful, e.g., to reduce crosstalk on NVidia’s NVision shutter glasses. See help of PsychImaging.

• Our MOGL OpenGL for Matlab and Octave low-level support now supports a large subset of OpenGL 4.5 functionality. Functionality of OpenGL versions more recent than version 2.1 is supported via OpenGL extensions as in the past, but our support is now more complete wrt. the latest OpenGL 4.5 spec. E.g., Geometry Shaders do work now.

• The Datapixx mex files for VPixx devices like Datapixx, Viewpixx and Propixx is now available with identical full feature set on all operating systems and supported Matlab and Octave versions. PsychImaging will now take care of especially large VBLANK intervals as used by those devices in frame sequential stereo modes.

• Improvements and bug fixes to the NetStation() driver for EGI Netstation EEG systems.

• Bug fixes and enhancements to DrawFormattedText.

• The RemapMouse function can now also handle display rotation by Psychtoolbox panel fitter, ie., rotation generated by the PsychImaging functions UseDisplayRotation and UsePanelFitter can now be properly handled wrt. mouse input, as demonstrated in PanelFitterDemo.

• Many bug fixes and improvements to demos, help texts or other documentation.

GNU Linux

• Support for Ubuntu 14.10 and compatible/derived flavors - tested with 64-Bit KUbuntu 14.10. help SyncTrouble points to a new set of example xorg.conf configuration files and explains how to install those in your system to optimize it for best visual stimulus onset timing and timestamping precision. This release has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 and KUbuntu 14.04 and KUbuntu 14.10 with X-Servers XOrg-1.15 and 1.16, Linux kernels 3.13, 3.16 and later kernels on open-source radeon, nouveau and intel graphics drivers with multiple Radeon graphics cards, NVidia graphics cards and Intel graphics cards and shows excellent visual timing behaviour on all tested systems. Especially on Apple systems, the tested Linux distros outperformed OSX wrt. timing precision and reliability by large margins, sometimes up to 300x more precise.

• Improved deep color 10 bpc framebuffer support on Linux. New 11 bpc and (up to) 16 bpc framebuffer support for AMD graphics cards when using the open-source graphics driver on a deep color capable HDMI or DisplayPort display device. Details of setup, limitations and capabilities for different systems are explained in the help text of PsychImaging.

Apple OSX

• Support for Mac OSX 10.10 “Yosemite”. However, initial testing on two machines and user feedback suggests that 10.10 seems to be even more buggy and unsuitable for neuro-science applications than 10.9 and 10.8 were. None of the bugs present in OSX and known to me have been fixed by Apple, as far as initial testing goes. Visual timing and timestamping precision has degraded even further. Expect many new “Sync failures”, as all attempts to workaround OSX flaws have failed. The PsychtoolboxKernelDriver is now even more important for precise visual timing, but no longer works by default on Intel GPUs. Forcing its use on Intel gpu’s is possible but can cause serious system malfunctions on some Macintosh computers, with a small but non-zero probability of making your machine unbootable without the help of an Apple repair technician. In order to load the driver at all on OSX 10.10 for the supported NVidia and AMD gpus, you will need to disable kernel module verification in Apples OS. See “help PsychtoolboxKernelDriver” for instructions to do so at the downside of reducing system resilience against hackers and computer viruses.

• Improved PsychHID for OSX: Now supports multiple parallel simultaneous keyboard queues, catching up a bit to the superior PsychHID for Linux. Now can cope with Apples broken HID keyboard handling on MacbookAir 2013 and later, making keyboard queues working again on the MacbookAir.

• Support for Apple Retina displays. Visual stimulus onset timing and timestamping should work better now with such non-standard HiDPI display devices. Psychtoolbox will use its panel fitter by default to create backwards compatible behaviour to version 3.0.11, but with hopefully fixed visual onset timing, working around Apples Retina display hacks. A new PsychImaging task UseRetinaResolution allows to make use of the full resolution of Retina displays (typically twice the horizontal and vertical video resolution for 4 times more pixels), at the performance impact caused by the much higher GPU rendering load.

• Many new awful workarounds for broken Apple operating systems.