From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: September 13, 2006 9:53:37 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Astro IIDC Doesn't Like My DMK 21AF04, Either

Hi David;

On 13-Sep-06, at 8:41 PM, David Illig wrote:

It would be good if Astro IIDC provided a general driver for FW cameras

that made those cameras available to other applications as well. I'm

thinking of regular webcam apps like EvoCam, the BTV Pro app, and

Equinox for guiding, e.g.

Unfortunately the Quicktime VDIG architecture isn't suitable for this at all. QT is fine for smaller fixed frame rate video, but it's pretty well useless once you stray from that. For example, it's basically impossible to extract 16 bit / RGB48 bit images from a VDIG - the architecture simply will not allow it (TWAIN can do it though). And the VDIG frame extraction method using a polling architecture and can not be hardware driven. And yes I have tried doing it the QuickTime way and it's an absolute mess to make it sort of work - and that was just for one particular camera model. Once you thrown in supporting say 10 different camera manufacturers, it simply isn't pleasant unless you pair down the individual camera functionality a lot.

For example, when MSSS was working on the Mars Stereo Robotics project, they licensed our underlying IIDC framework because all the Quicktime based solutions could not deliver more than one 1280x1024 8 bit monochrome frame per second for one camera. However using our none Quicktime based framework, they were delivering a sustained 12 frames per second at 1280x1024 8 bit monochrome from two cameras at the same time. That's 24 times the through put and this was on a G4 Mac Mini too.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com