[AG-TECH] Re: interesting discussion on ag-techs about omvic on mac's
Wesley Miaw
wesley at bmrc.berkeley.edu
Sat Aug 2 15:16:32 CDT 2003
With regards to the recent discussion on camera drivers and omvic on
Mac OS X:
The Orange Micro driver (which is a wrapper around Apple's driver) will
not work. I was unable to figure out how to make it work--it doesn't
seem to support the low-level API I am currently using.
The most recent IOXperts driver will not work. Something broke between
1.5 and 1.6 of the old, non USB-FireWire combo driver and discussions
with IOXperts and myself were unable to resolve the issue. The new
USB-FireWire combo driver appears to carry over this incompatibility.
The old IOXperts FireWire 1.5 driver does work. This driver should be
available through VRVS and possibly off the Open Mash web site.
Notes from IOXperts only iChat AV and iSight incompatibility indicate
that Apple is discouraging third-party developers to support iChat AV
on systems that will not produce the highest-quality results. Namely
USB cameras. It is not necessary to uninstall the IOXperts driver to
make use of iSight and iChat AV, however, as you are given the option
of choosing your video and audio capture devices and drivers in the
iChat AV perferences.
There are third-party workarounds to get USB cameras to work with iChat
AV. A Google search should turn them up.
For those who are interested, the reason I used the lower-level API,
which seems to be the cause of all the driver incompatibilities, is
because Mash does everything internally as YUV. The higher-level API
does not provide the YUV colorspace, and would require converting each
frame from some form of RGB to YUV. Apple did not appear to have
built-in conversion routines to do this, which might be fast enough. At
this point, however, it seems like that might be the only way to ensure
driver compatibility. An older version of video-macosx.cc in CVS has
notes on implementing this. Things may also have changed with QuickTime
6.1, however I did not see anything I thought would help address the
problem when I read through the release notes.
Hope this helps,
--
Wesley Miaw, Berkeley Multimedia Research Center
wesley at bmrc.berkeley.edu
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