Psychtoolbox-3 Flavors, Versions, and Version Numbers
Flavors of PTB-3
Historically, PTB-3 was available in two different flavors, but only one flavor matters nowadays:
- beta/current: This is what all users should use! The beta (aka current) branch provides the latest and greatest features, performance enhancements and bug fixes. These features have been successfully tested by the developers on their system configurations and should be reasonably safe for real world use and testing. However, there may be bugs that didn't show up in our setups, and we only have very limited resources for testing, so new stuff needs to be exposed to real world use on many different hardware configurations. We rely on you for testing of new features and for feedback about problems or bugs.
- unsupported: This flavor was formerly known under the very misleading name "stable" and is now officially declared dead. You should avoid "unsupported" unless you really know what you are doing and just love trouble or archeology. "unsupported" doesn't work on Matlab V7.4 (R2007a) and later on Microsoft Windows! It has not been updated for more than 2 years and we have no intention of ever fixing any of the bugs and shortcomings in it, nor will we provide you with any support or help if you are foolish enough to still use it.
Before we apply potentially disruptive changes to beta, we release a new version of Psychtoolbox, named Psychtoolbox-x.y.z with x.y.z being the version number. An example of such a disruptive change would be discontinuation of support for an operating system, Matlab version or computer hardware platform. We recommend sticking to the default beta flavor unless you have good reason not to do so.
Version numbers
The Psychtoolbox-3 version is a three digit number, e.g. 3.0.8. The first digit is always 3. We bump the second or third digit only for major releases, but these happen only periodically. Usually we only update the beta branch of PTB for the purpose of introducing single bug fixes, new features or incremental improvements. Thus the beta branch varies continuously, and the incremental updates are differentiated by their SVN revision number. Executing the command PsychtoolboxVersion should return the version number, flavor and revision number of your current Psychtoolbox. The command also prints a weblink which points you to the SVN online weblog where you can read in detail what has changed between different revisions.
Previous releases
The following releases of old Psychtoolbox versions are available. We highly recommend avoiding any versions of the OpenGL toolbox with version numbers earlier than this. There were some unfortunately numbered versions 1.0.x released earlier in the development of PTB-3, but this numbering caused so much confusion with respect to PTB Version 2 that we have now abandoned that system.
- Psychtoolbox-3.0.8-PreTiger A snapshot of the code as of 18th february 2009: This is the last release that is (assumed, not tested!) to work properly in most parts on MacOS/X versions prior to 10.4 "Tiger", i.e., 10.3 Panther and earlier. It is also the last release with support for GNU/Octave versions prior to 3.2.0 on Mac OS and Linux.
- Psychtoolbox-3.0.7 A snapshot of the code as of Friday, October 6th, 2006: Adds basic and limited support for movie playback on OSX via Quicktime, some performance enhancements to the drawing functions and a few bug fixes. See the 3.0.7 release notes for more details.
