Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.14 "Sommerloch" released

Announcements
1

Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 update “Sommerloch” was released at 11th August 2024.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.14”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.14

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.13:

  • None expected.

Highlights:

  • None.

All:

  • Screen('DrawDots'): Only apply a margin to non-square dot types.
    Only round dots get trimmed in the fragment shader, and so dot_type=4
    was left with too much padding from the vertex shader. Bug fix contributed
    by Alex Forrence @aforren1

  • Python extensions built from this release onwards should also work with
    NumPy 2.x in addition to NumPy 1.x. Changes contributed by Eric Larson.

Linux:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024a.

  • Undo Screen('OpenMovie') compatibility fix for Ubuntu 24.04-LTS, of
    using pipewiresink as audio sink. While this does fix the pulseaudio bugs
    of delayed playback (see Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.12), the pipewiresink plugin
    itself, as shipping in Ubuntu 24.04-LTS / GStreamer 1.24, has its own bugs,
    which are worse and impact more frequent use cases, e.g., seeking, change
    of playback speed, reverse playback, and instabilities or hangs at end of
    playback for some common movies. Iow. use of pipewiresink causes regressions.

    See forum bug report here:

    https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/10-second-delay-with-with-gst-state-change-async/3924

    GStreamer folks know about the problem but there ain’t a solution yet.

    As of this release, the pipewiresink can still be used as an active opt-in,
    accepting other potential types of audio playback problems, and if opted in,
    should fix the following issue on Ubuntu 24.04-LTS and later, and other
    distributions that use Pipewire as desktop sound server and have an outdated
    buggy Pulseaudio 16 installation, instead of the more recent Pulseaudio 17.

    See the following issue for this bug, which is luckily not encountered often:

    https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/issues/814

    On unfixed affected systems (mostly Ubuntu 22.04-LTS), if there is
    a notable time delay between Screen('OpenMovie') and start of
    video+audio playback via Screen('PlayMovie'), then the movie
    playback will freeze after displaying the 1st video frame for the
    duration of that delay between OpenMovie and PlayMovie, then
    continue. Problem didn’t exist in earler Linux distributions like
    Ubuntu 20.04-LTS and is fixed by this bug fix for later distros like
    Ubuntu 24.04-LTS from April 2024.

    The use of pipewiresink can be enforced as workaround by specifying the
    following string as ‘movieoptions’ parameter in Screen('Openmovie', ...);
    ‘AudioSink=pipewiresink’.

  • RaspberryPi now also allows GetSecs clock selection, like the Intel
    variants do since a few releases.

Windows:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2024a and
    Octave 7.3.

  • GetGitPath(): Fix path to git on MS-Windows. Bug fix contributed by
    Alex Forrence @aforren1

macOS:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and tested against Matlab R2024a and against
    Octave 9.2 from HomeBrew.

  • SetupPsychtoolbox(): Try to fix it properly for macOS with xattr calls.
    Skip xattr calls for .mltbx installed files via Matlab Add-On explorer,
    as those already have their quarantine flags removed.

    For other (zip file) install locations, handle blanks/spaces in the
    installation path.

    Also some output text cleanups and fixes. Tested with .mltbx and zip file
    path install on path with spaces etc. Lets hope this goes better.

Enjoy!