Flavors and Versions

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.

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 and testing.

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.

Versioned Releases

The beta branch of PTB is normally updated for the purpose of introducing single 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.

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. We recommend to stick with the beta branch, unless you have good reason not to do so.

Previous Releases

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 these 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.

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.