From: "wesley_ae" <awesley@acquerra.com.au>

Date: November 28, 2005 5:08:28 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: DMK camera fixes itself - is there some kind of timeout?

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "Milton Aupperle" <milton@o...> wrote:

Anthony;

Milton, is that really the way that Astro_IIDC is written? I find that

a bit surprising. I use Linux for my firewire imaging and an

application called Coriander which lets me unplug and replug my

firewire camera as often as I like without crashing.

NO - ASTRO IIDC DID NOT CRASH - Where did you Get That From?

He unplugged the camera and expected it to automagically reconnect up

when he re-plugged it in. It cleanyl shut down and released all the

resources it had allocated.

If I unplug the camera then it cleanly shuts down any capture stream

and puts up a dialog box saying something like "No firewire camera

present. Please connect a camera to continue". It sits there patiently

until I plug a camera back in (either the same camera or a different

one) and then the dialog closes and the application resumes with the

new camera.

So does Astro IIDC. IT NEVER CRASHES even while the stream was running

and you yank the cord. It did warn him that the camera was having a

problem and also printed off warnign messages in the console.log.

As I said before - under OS 9 at the system level if you disconected

it it would reconnect up automagically - under OS X it doesn't happen

at all - it's left orphaned. You can force it too - but that has it's

own problems under OS X.

I assumed that all firewire applications would behave like this, as

the firewire protocol has more than enough flexibility to allow it.

That's a limitation of OS X's I/O Kit implementatio.

It's vey sad to hear that unplugging a firewire camera could cause any

sort of crash. That is reminiscent of a different operating system...

Why not try actually READING what was written. At no time did anyone

say "Astro IIDC  Crashed" because of this.

Milton Aupperle

Here is part of your original post:

What your doing is just not a "smart thing" to do and if you try

that with

any device that is actively transmitting data, the results are

unpredictable. That's the same thing as simply pulling the plug on

your Mac while it's copying files, rather than shutting it down form

the Apple menu. If you do that with a IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB or

FireWire hard drive while transferring files, you can lose entire

volume as the disk map can become corrupted - let alone kernel panics

and other fun things.

Read it carefully - you say that unplugging the video is "the same

thing" as unplugging a hard drive while it's copying files, and will

lead to kernel panics etc.

I'm glad to hear that is not really the case, and that Astro_IIDC

handles it cleanly. I'm sure Steve is glad to hear that too :-)

regards, Anthony