SGNewChannel error -9405 on Mac 10.9.1

Question

I am getting an error –9405, couldntGetRequiredComponent, with

SGNewChannel(m_Grabber, VideoMediaType, &m_Channel)

on Mac system 10.9.1. This code works on older systems. Is anyone else having this issue?

Edit - Initialization code:

// standard SG initialization 
err = OpenADefaultComponent(SeqGrabComponentType, 0, &m_Grabber); 
err = SGInitialize(m_Grabber); 
err = SGSetDataRef(m_Grabber, 0, 0, seqGrabDontMakeMovie);

Answer 1

After spending some time reverse engineering what SGNewChannel does on both OS X 10.8 and 10.9 I have found what might be the cause of the new behavior on 10.9.

The SGNewChannel function tries to open a video digitizer component with some code roughly equivalent to this (minus the logs):

ComponentDescription componentDescription = {'vdig', 0, 0, 0, 0};
Component component = FindNextComponent(NULL, &componentDescription);
while (component)
{
    Handle componentName = NewHandle(255);
    Handle componentInfo = NewHandle(255);
    GetComponentInfo(component, NULL, componentName, componentInfo, NULL);
    ComponentInstance ci;
    OSErr err = OpenAComponent(component, &ci);
    printf("*** %5d (%p) %p %s -- %s\n", err, ci, component, P2CStr((StringPtr)*componentName), P2CStr((StringPtr)*componentInfo));
    DisposeHandle(componentName);
    DisposeHandle(componentInfo);
    component = FindNextComponent(component, &componentDescription);
}

If you run this on 10.9, you will get this result:

DVFreeThread - CFMachPortCreateWithPort hack = 0x18caf0, fPowerNotifyPort= 0x18ce90
*** -9408 (0x0) 0x10207 DV Video -- This component is the FireWire Video Digitizer
***   704 (0x0) 0x10216 IIDC FireWire Video -- This is the Apple IIDC FireWire Video Digitizer.
***   704 (0x0) 0x10323 USB Video Class Video -- This is the Apple USB Video Class Video Digitizer.

The three calls to OpenAComponent fail (once with error -9408 and twice with error 704).

If you run this on 10.8, you will get this result:

DVFreeThread - CFMachPortCreateWithPort hack = 0x5751a0, fPowerNotifyPort= 0x576cd0
*** -9408 (0x0) 0x10208 DV Video -- This component is the FireWire Video Digitizer
***   704 (0x0) 0x10217 IIDC FireWire Video -- This is the Apple IIDC FireWire Video Digitizer.
***     0 (0x830000) 0x10324 USB Video Class Video -- This is the Apple USB Video Class Video Digitizer.

Notice that the last calls succeeds!

The Apple USB Video Class Video Digitizer component is located at /System/Library/QuickTime/QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer.component. So I looked at what’s different on 10.8 and 10.9 in this component by setting a symbolic breakpoint in lldb on APWVDOUSBVDCDigitizerEntry which is the entry point of this component.

It turns out it may be a sandbox related issue. On 10.9, there is a call to sandbox_check for device-camera that doesn’t exist on 10.8. So I suggest that you try to add an entitlement to access the camera and see if that solves the problem.