oacapture/oalive 1.8.0 released

oacapture and oalive 1.8.0 are released!

Changes in this release include:

  • Add support for Omegon cameras
  • Update to latest ZWO libraries
  • Update to latest Altair libraries
  • Update to latest (non beta) QHY libraries
  • Fixes for RPI cameras (standard and HQ)
  • Fix for QHY camera support on MacOS
  • Fix for IIDC camera support on MacOS
  • Fix handling of 16-bit IIDC image frames
  • Fix handling of 10-, 12- and 14-bit unpacked frames for FITS
  • Improve handling of auto-exposure control
  • Add support for FITS ROWORDER keyword
  • Improve YUYV and UYVY to RGB colour conversions
  • Beta support for Basler cameras on Linux
  • Update Spanish translations
  • Fix handling of Flycapture on/off and auto controls
  • Fix 16-bit mode (I hope) for cameras supported by libqhyccd
  • Enable 8-bit mono-as-raw for Neximage 10
  • Various other bugfixes

I have no Omegon camera to test with so support for those cameras may not be perfect. However, as they appear to be rebadged Touptek cameras similar to those of Altair, Risingcam and Opticstar, all of which do work, I feel fairly confident about it.

I’m not sure the RPi cameras are supported in ARM Ubuntu releases, so the RPi cameras may only be available in Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS.

Support for Basler cameras is via the Basler Pylon libraries which will need to be downloaded from Basler’s website. This has only been tested with a single, quite old, Basler monochrome Gig-E camera so there may well be issues with OSC or USB models.

There’s a new camera setting to allow frames that are reported as being 8-bit greyscale to be treated as 8-bit raw colour. This is because the Neximage 10 appears to do exactly that. If this option is enabled for any other camera it’s going to have unpredictable behaviour.

Some people have reported problems saving images in MacOS, but I can’t reproduce it so if it doesn’t work for you and you’re able to provide more information, please do.

In release 1.8.7 of the INDI library, there was a breakage that affected the installation of oacapture (as well as the GIMP and a number of other applications). I’ve not yet checked to see if this is resolved in the very latest INDI release, but unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about the problem 🙁

My intention is to have the next release done fairly soon with a small number of changes, possibly including beta support for the SVBony SV305.