A technical test version of the new Moviesandbox is now online. It’s still missing the new icons and a lot of the obvious spit and polish things like visible scrollbar buttons and some other glaring ommissions. But it’ll give you a very good indication as to how fast/pretty/stable it will run on your computer and operating system of choice.

You can download it from here – all executables are in this zip-file:

GitHub Unstable Repository

Please do download this test version and click around in it a bit!

Instructions on how to install the latest OpenNI drivers can be found here:

Wiki preliminary Kinect installation instructions

Known bugs and limitations:

All:
* This is NOT a production release, but a bugfix and test release.
* Please test things out and report strange behavior!
* Best place to report is the comments (Forums and wiki need some love…)
* It has bugs!
* I will fix a lot of them!
* the filesystem and saving/loading is still a bit experimental. In case all you see is a grey screen, try creating a “New Scene” from the file menu and save right after.
* Please play around with it so I can get a feeling how it behaves with different directory structures!

Linux:
* You need to change permission to be able to Read&Write and execute Moviesandbox and msbKinect.
* You need the following things installed: (either sudo apt-get install or ubuntu software center):
freeglut3, libfreeimage and glee. Maybe more?

(if someone knows how I can circumvent that, I would be very happy to know!)
* System dialogs still need some work.
* camera turning will be fixed very soon
* Kinect application will not launch out of Moviesandbox (please go to Moviesandbox/tools/msbKinect and sudo ./msbKinect, as it needs the privileges for shared memory).
* I compiled on a x64 machine but will see if I can find a x86 over the weekend to see if things work with the provided executables.
* Best image quality – no artifacts (probably because of superior OpenGL drivers to mac os and win7)

Mac OSX:
* seems to be okay just starting the kinect regularly, but seems to have trouble actually converting the kinect capture to a drawing (which works like a charm in the other OSs).
* I compiled for x86 and tested on Radeon X1900 (looks terrible, but works), GeForce 9400 and GeForce 9600.
* Dock and Apple Menu vanish when Moviesandbox is in focus, but come back when you click on other windows.
* This is because of some weird menu items in the apple menu that I have no idea how to get rid of ( and that have no effect on the program)!

Windows:
* should work on ATI 1600+ and NVidia 7000+ cards on xp, vista and win7, 64 or 32 bit, but is compiled 32bit.
* start as administrator for kinect pointcloud direct-memory connectivity
* I found that 2x antialiasing leads to horrible moire effects in the normal map. There will be options to get around that, but I wanted to let you know.
* has the most tool programs – audioInput, multiHID input, milkscanner and Kinect ( will be all cross-platform soon).

I will publish bi-nightly builds in the next 2 weeks trying to improve whatever ugly and/or sneaky things are creeping up.
They will all be available on the same download link!
Finally, I’ll load in the new icons, mouse-pointers etc over the next two weekends. I will also somehow magically create documentation, most likely over the weekend. For now though, the original video tutorials should give you a basic – if outdated – idea of how things work.

Sadly, there are a couple of important features that did not make it into this release, like kinect animation recording (you can live perform, but not record, documentation soon!) or dump-to-tga saving of scenes.
I will patch them in later. I’ll have plenty of time over the holidays.

I shall now retreat to my mattress, and will be happy to read your feedback tomorrow.
Please do give it a go and report back with your specs and findings.
Feel free to have a look at the “logfile.txt” or send it to me if you encounter any crashes. All of this will be immensely helpful!
Thanks!