Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.7 release “Christmas looks” released

Announcements
1

Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 Beta update “Christmas looks” was released at 16th December 2023.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.7”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.7

This Psychtoolbox release was sponsored to a large degree by Mathworks under the year
2023/2024 contract., and also to some degree by our partner SR-Research, makers of the Eyelink gaze trackers.

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.6:

None.

Highlights:

  • Further refinement to the performance improvements for hardware accelerated
    movie playback via GStreamer and gpu hardware video decoders on Linux and
    MS-Windows, with only very minor benefit to macOS.

  • Eyelink mex file improvements.

  • Usability improvements for macOS.

All:

  • Screen: Allow dynamic, per-movie, enable and disable of hardware accelerated video
    decoding when using GStreamer 1.18 or later, iow. on MS-Windows, macOS, RaspberryPi OS,
    and Ubuntu 22.04-LTS and later. Only on older GStreamer versions, e.g., Ubuntu 20.04,
    will a hardware decoding disable last for the remainder of a session, ie. until
    Octave/Matlab is quit, once the disable flag for hardware decoding has been given
    once in a session. Also some minor robustness improvements to movie playback if
    special flags are given, which could cause some trouble sometimes.

  • Eyelink: New and improved Eyelink mex files with some contributions by SR-Research,
    specifically from Brian Richardson, Marcus Johnson, and Kurt Debono. Thanks!

    • A new subfunction ‘EDKVersion’ provides version information about the Eyelink
      software core library runtime in use.

    • A new subfunction ‘EyelinkSendFile’ to send a file to the Eyelink tracker
      computer. Using this function, an image or video can be uploaded from the
      display PC to the host Tracker PC.

    • Eyelink(‘OpenFile’): Another attempt to fix the ‘dontOpenExisting’ flag.

      ‘dontOpenExisting’ functionality was broken from day 1, but nobody bothered
      to ever give us feedback about this, not even the person who requested that
      functionality! As a new attempt at a fix by myself, lets try the following
      untested fix:

      Assume that create_path() is a way to find out if a file already exists
      on the tracker computer, given that file_exists() actually operates on
      the stimulation computer, contrary to what anybody expected. The Eyelink
      programmers manual is very unclear about these file utility functions.

      This may be wrong as well, no feedback from SR-Research yet. Let’s see…

    • Eyelink(‘ImageTransfer’): Restore my version of it, but also add some bug
      fixes by SR-Research, so that it hopefully now finally works as intended.

    • Fix regression for potential buffer overflow in ‘EyelinkGetQueuedData’, and
      generally make ‘EyelinkGetQueuedData’ and ‘EyelinkGetFloatDataRaw’ more robust
      and memory-safe.

    • Minor other improvements and cleanups to Eyelink mex.

  • Simplify OS type and 64-Bit detection functions, ie. IsWin(), IsLinux(), IsOSX(),
    IsARM(), Is64Bit(), IsWindows(), IsWinVista(), IsWinMatlabR11Style().

  • IsARM(): Try to detect running on 64-Bit ARM or on native Apple Silicon Matlab/Octave.

  • DownloadPsychtoolbox and UpdatePsychtoolbox: Prepare for EOL at 8-Jan-2024.

    GitHub will shut down and permanently remove its Subversion frontend that day,
    so our current SVN based downloader and updater methods will fail completely.

    There may be, and already have been, temporary brownouts in the service, as a
    heads up by GitHub about what’s coming.

    Inform users, and about their inconvenient alternatives, so they are less
    stumped by what is happening, assuming an ability to read. Due to the severe
    lack of financial support by the vast majority of our users, we didn’t have
    and don’t have the time right now to deal with this and find new solutions or
    workarounds for this problem. Finally people get what they pay for.

  • Merge in some new GitHub actions, contributed by Mathworks open-source team,
    which allow auto-building of zip files of the Psychtoolbox folder and of a
    corresponding MTLBX file for each tagged release. This is preliminary and needs
    more work and refinement, but may help a bit to work around imminent failure
    of DownloadPsychtoolbox and UpdatePsychtoolbox for MS-Windows and Apple macOS
    users. Thanks to Bensingh Pancras from Mathworks for this work!

Linux:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b.

Windows:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b.

macOS:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b and Octave 8.4
    from HomeBrew.

  • IsARM(): Try to detect running on 64-Bit ARM or on native Apple Silicon Matlab/Octave.

  • PsychtoolboxPostInstallRoutine(): Detect and reject native Apple Silicon Matlab/Octave.
    Point to Intel variants under Rosetta 2 emulation instead. Untested so far.

Enjoy!