| layout | title | categories |
|---|---|---|
page |
Flavors and Versions |
getting-started |
Historically, users could choose among two different branches of Psychtoolbox-3: beta and stable.
Since then the stable branch has fallen into disuse and has become
deprecated. Day-to-day development now occurs on GitHub, with the beta branch
in Subversion serving as the main distribution channel to our users.
| beta | current, rolling releases of Psychtoolbox |
| stable | deprecated and unsupported branch, removed in 3.0.10 |
The beta branch provides the latest features, performance enhancements
and bug fixes. These features have been tested by the developers on the
system configurations at their disposal and should be reasonably safe for real
world use.
However, there may be undiscovered bugs, and with the very limited resources new stuff needs to see real world use to shake out remaining bugs. We rely on you for the testing of new features and for feedback about problems or bugs.
The beta branch of PTB is normally updated for the purpose of introducing
bug fixes, new features or incremental improvements. Thus the beta
branch pushes out rolling releases, and the incremental updates are
reflected in their SVN revision number.
Executing the command PsychtoolboxVersion should return the version number,
flavor and revision number of your current Psychtoolbox. The command also
prints a web URL, which points to the online change log where you can read in
detail what has changed between different revisions. You can use the info provided
by PsychtoolboxVersion to restore your installation to a given version, providing
the SVN revision number to our DownloadPsychtoolbox install script, useful for
documenting your research software and ensure reproducibility of the software environment.
Before any potentially disruptive changes are merged into the beta branch, we
tag and release a new version of Psychtoolbox following the versioning scheme
Psychtoolbox-3.x.y. Examples of such disruptive changes would be the
discontinuation of support for an operating system, Matlab version, or a computer
hardware platform - anything that could introduce functional regressions into your
existing hardware and software environment. We recommend to stick with the beta
branch, unless you have good reason not to do so, as it is the only officially
tested and supported branch.
The following releases of old Psychtoolbox versions are available.
There were some unfortunately numbered versions 1.0.x released earlier in the development of PTB-3, but this numbering caused so much confusion with respect to PTB Version 2 that we have now abandoned that system.
To download and install the following versions, use the
DownloadPsychtoolbox function
Psychtoolbox-3.0.11
: A snapshot of the code as of September 2014: This was the final 3.0.11 release
before start of the 3.0.12 series. It was the last version that supported
32-Bit Matlab on any operating system (specifically on Linux and Windows, as
support for 32-Bit Matlab for OSX was cancelled already in 3.0.10). Going on, only
64-Bit Octave and Matlab are supported on all operating systems, and only
32-Bit Octave continues to be supported on Linux. This was also the last version
to work on OSX versions older than 10.8 "Mountain Lion", and to be tested and
supported on MS-Windows versions older than Windows-7. Going on, Windows XP
and later still should work, but we won't test or optimize or provide any kind
of support or bug fixes for anything older than Windows-7. Similarly we only
provide official support for the very latest OSX version. Psychtoolbox-3.0.11
is also the last release to use the GStreamer-0.10 legacy multi-media framework
for movie playback, movie writing, video capture and video recording. Future
releases use and require GStreamer-1.0 or later for multi-media functionality.
Psychtoolbox-3.0.10
: A snapshot of the code as of July 2013: This was the final 3.0.10 release
before start of the 3.0.11 series. It was the last version that supported
32-Bit Matlab on OSX.
To download and install the following legacy versions, use the
DownloadLegacyPsychtoolbox function
Psychtoolbox-3.0.9
: A snapshot of the code as of May 2012: This was the final 3.0.9 release
before start of the 3.0.10 series. It was the last version that supports
Matlab versions older than V7.4 (a.k.a R2007a). It was also the last version
to support Apple PowerPC hardware. Support for Apple’s Quicktime will be
also phased out after this version, in favor of the much more modern, free
and open-source cross-platform GStreamer multimedia framework, which will
take over Quicktime’s duties. This was also the last version to support
32-Bit GNU/Octave on MS-Windows and OSX.
Psychtoolbox-3.0.8
: A snapshot of the code as of April 2011: This was the final 3.0.8 release
before start of the 3.0.9 series with its new “mostly MIT” license model.
Psychtoolbox-3.0.8-PreMatlab6.5
: A snapshot of the code as of late 2010: This was the last release that worked
with Matlab versions before V6.5.
Psychtoolbox-3.0.8-PreTiger
: A snapshot of the code as of February 2009: This was the last release
that is (assumed, not tested!) to work properly in most parts on Mac OS X
versions prior to 10.4 “Tiger”, i.e., 10.3 “Panther” and earlier. It was also
the last release with support for GNU Octave versions prior to 3.2.0 on Mac
OS and Linux.
Psychtoolbox-3.0.7
: A snapshot of the code as of October 2006: Added basic and limited support
for movie playback on OSX via Quicktime, some performance enhancements to the
drawing functions and a few bug fixes.