Welcome to the C+FOX webpage

C+FOX is an Open Source C++ library that provides an easy to use interface for acquiring images from FireWire camera on OS X platform. It has been developed by Joel FALCOU and is based on the JAVA Firewire Camera Acquisition library FWCamAkiz by Adrian Daerr.

So What is This About?

FireWire is one of the fastest peripheral standards ever developed, which makes it great for use with multimedia peripherals such as digital video cameras and other high-speed devices like the latest hard disk drives and printers.

However, using it efficiently under MAC OS X system requires a deep understanding of how FireWire interacts with the lowest layers of this OS. This leads to code that can't be easily kept clean or debugged. This is even more true for digital camera.

Far from Quicktime or hand-written C IOKit interface, the C+FOX provides a clean interface. Reading from a FireWire camera becomes as easy as getting data from the standard input.

Latest News

October 25 - 2005 : Initial Release
C+FOX v1.0 is available for download. Current features are :

  • Support for non-compressed video cameras roughly compatible with the IIDC specs.
  • Support monochrom or color camera up to 30 FPS.
  • Works on MAC OS X 10.3.5 and above.
C+FOX has been tested on PowerPC G4, G5 and on XServe G5. Bug reports and tests on other Apple machines/OS combination are welcome.