Am I the only one P*ssed *ff with Pentax and the K20D firware upgrade?

Bibble in their great wisdom does not support DNG. From what I gather it is kind of an anti Adobe thing.
Douglas Film

....ehhh anyone know Katana script... I ve got a good Idae where to edit the BIN file but due to the fact unless I translate the hex from Katana to english I'm not a hundred percent sure that the hacked bin fille will work and as I dont have a k20 I cannot test it.

I dont think their will be a lot of people here on this forum willing to test a hacked firmware in their camera.

It also shows that there could be a proplem with all future firmware releases unto your soft ware developers release updates for all their RAW viewers and converters.
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shadow

Problem is DNG is not totally vendor independent. They left enough "grey areas" for the manufacturers to put in what they want. Granted a file would be "functional" but not totally translated as the manufacturer wants unless the manufacturere allow it.
Always has been the sticky point. DNG is not totally open....

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'The exposure meter is calibrated to some clearly defined standards and the user needs to adjust his working method and his subject matter to these values. It does not help to suppose all kinds of assumptions that do not exist.'
Erwin Puts

What do you expect. When you sound like a raving lunatic who on a number of replies didn't want to listen to reason and blew the whole issues out of proportion.

--
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It is amazing what people will let big corporations do and not hold them accountable. In all the responce's there is nothing from Ned or anyone from Pentax while Bibble did reply.
Douglas Film

So when is Bibble's fix going to be released?

Colleen did not give a date, my guess is it could be here by Christmas.
Douglas Film

Let's look closely at this situation:

You had a Pentax camera and Bibble software.

They worked perfectly fine together.

Pentax made some changes and now your software won't work.

OBVIOUSLY Bibble is at fault.

Case closed.

Roland Mabo said:

In this case, there are other RAW converters out there that does not
have the problem that Bibble has with the new PEF-files from the
K20D. This means that the programmers of Bibble must doing something
wrong, since there are others that has suceeded.

Click to expand...

No, it just means that they have a different set of risks that they're willing to take. Bibble supports more than 100 file formats. I don't know which raw converter you're thinking of specifically, but I doubt that it runs natively on windows, mac (PPC and Intel) and linux with the same feature set as Bibble. We have to minimize the number of crashes that we have to track down as much as we can. It's going to inconvenience some people for a period of time and we feel the alternative is worse. It's a design decision that you're free to reject and use someone else's software that made a different decision.

I don't see any reason to start calling people names over it.

-Colleen
Bibble Labs

I was out taking photos yesterday and some people asked what brand camera I had. Before I could reply one person who knows I work at the hospital said oh he has a special medical camera. Then someone said thats right their Dentist has a Pentax he photographed her mouth with. I never did get a chance to talk as they saw some other friends and were off with them.
Douglas Film

jeffkrol said:

Using a simple text string to identify a file is somewhat just the
down and dirty way.

Click to expand...

What would you propose as the alternative? If you've got a better way, I'm open to hearing it. Keep in mind that many of our customers like to keep 500+ large images in a single folder, and that we need to be able to scan all of them quickly to put the previews on the screen.

-Colleen

I disagree, Pentax should have only made firmware changes to fix the hot pixels ( the reason for the update) and left everything else as it was.
Douglas Film

Douglas Film said:

Bibble in their great wisdom does not support DNG. From what I
gather it is kind of an anti Adobe thing.

Click to expand...

We support DNG written natively by the cameras. If you think this firmware update is a nightmare, supporting arbitrarily written DNGs is far worse. There is no definitive make and model name to identify files converted from their native format to DNG. If the DNG comes straight from the camera, we know precisely what the manufacturer calls the files (unless of course they change it in a firmware update). We don't have any objections to the DNG format when it's written by the hardware, and it looks like DNG 1.2 is going to solve several of our issues with writing out DNG.

The DNG specification (in my opinion) needs to put some more requirements on software that's converting from a native format into DNG. Unless of course we're all going to assume that all converted DNGs come from Adobe. If we assume that, then either we wait until their converter supports a new camera so we can see what string their using to identify the camera, or we have to issue an update after Adobe's release if we guessed what they would probably use incorrectly. You can see how the lack of consistency in the file identifiers is already affecting our customers. We aren't really looking forward to dealing with it as a more regular problem. It would be a much better world if the specification made it possible for all developers to support converting to DNG for a newly released camera simultaneously instead of having Adobe's support be the defacto standard.

Anyhow, that's probably way more than you wanted to know. And we aren't anti-Adobe or anti any of our other competitors. Competition is good, it makes better products and gives users more choices.

-Colleen
Bibble Labs

Let me see if I understand Pentax DNG worked in Bibble as did their PEF but neither work after the K20D 1.01 firmware fix. Unlike capture one where post firmware update DNG work but not PEF files.

Colleen the information gives me a greater understanding of your job. Thank you for responding that alone is enough to keep me waiting for the update and continue using your software.

By the way my 76 year old mother thinks that Bibble's perfectly clear thing is the cats meow. She has Bibble lite and Bibbles her jpg's from her point and shoot camera.
Douglas Film

OK -- putting some stuff together from another helpful UNIX Pentaxian, Mac users can do the following.

1. Go here: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
2. Download the Mac OS X package ExifTool-7.34.
3. The ExifTool installer should open up. Install, with your admin password

Now you have ExifTools installed. As mentioned previously, Windows users can use a GUI (graphic user interface) wrapper, but Mac users have to use the command line.

4. Download from your card the .PEF files to a folder. Download to a folder on the desktop, called "x" .

5. BACK UP THIS FOLDER NOW. Important: put the backed up .PEFs in a different folder.
6. In Applications -> Utilities, open up "Terminal"

7. In terminal type "cd" and the spacebar. Now, from the desktop, drag the folder with the .PEFs on to the Terminal window. The Mac will auto-complete for you the address. (We are going into a directory with the images.)
8. Now copy and paste the following (much easier than typing):
exiftool -Make="PENTAX Corporation" Desktop/x .PEF

If you have the folder "x" open, you can watch ExifTool make copies of the original .PEF files and update the files with the new metadata that let's Aperture or iPhoto process those images.

9. Import into Aperture or iPhoto. Back up your vault or whatever.

10. Delete the contents of "x" when you're satisfied the .PEFs are what you want them to be.

C Vermillion said:

jeffkrol said:

Using a simple text string to identify a file is somewhat just the
down and dirty way.

Click to expand...

What would you propose as the alternative? If you've got a better
way, I'm open to hearing it. Keep in mind that many of our customers
like to keep 500+ large images in a single folder, and that we need
to be able to scan all of them quickly to put the previews on the
screen.

Click to expand...

Two questions, why are you using the maker string at all? If you want to identify the raw file, why not use the model tag? Or a check on the model tag and if you can't identify from the model tag a fallback to the maker. And why not use regular expressions if that should catch some of these minor changes. Not criticizing just trying to understand.

Cheers
Jochen

cycoj said:

Two questions, why are you using the maker string at all? If you want
to identify the raw file, why not use the model tag? Or a check on
the model tag and if you can't identify from the model tag a fallback
to the maker. And why not use regular expressions if that should
catch some of these minor changes. Not criticizing just trying to
understand.

Click to expand...

To be honest, I don't work much on the camera support end so I don't know historically why the make was needed. If I had to guess it would probably be to narrow down the possible models for speed reasons and to support the older cameras. Manufacturers have gotten a lot more explicit with their model tags these days and there is a lot more consistency in certain aspects of the file formats. I don't think that using the model tag entirely solves the problem, because that's just as easy for the manufacturer to change as the make tag. With non-standard files you want to be as certain as you can that you're interpreting that 4 byte word at offset 0x032F properly, so it's best to err on the too specific side of the line. It's better to refuse to read the file than accidentally go wandering off into random areas of the disk and memory. Right now the best way to identify the wide variety of cameras Bibble supports is string matching. I know it seems low tech to jeffkrol, but there just isn't anything else that I know of that you can come close to counting on.

We do some things to try to make the matching more robust, but I think that the problem here isn't that the software is refusing to read the files from the updated firmware. I don't think it's a good idea to load them assuming they'll work, because if Pentax changed the make string, they might have changed something else. The real problem is that it's difficult with software this complex to do a quick fix for one camera model and release it. It's something that I want to fix without requiring our users to download lots of different modules and burden them with having to figure out which versions are the ones they should use. And preferably I'd like to do it without having to rewrite the code for all 100+ models we already support

-Colleen

The latest application updates (in software update: iPhoto Update, iLife Support, iWeb Update, iMovie Update) have fixed this issue for me, using Aperture.

[U] timo said:

The latest application updates (in software update: iPhoto Update,
iLife Support, iWeb Update, iMovie Update) have fixed this issue for
me, using Aperture.

Click to expand...

While that is nice to know, it would have been better to just start a new thread than to resuscitate this train wreck.

--

Through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning[/U]

FYI: a test version of Bibble 4.10.1 can be downloaded from
http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=10943

Among other things, Bibble 4.10.1 can now recognize PEF files made with the 1.0.1 firmware in the K20D. No more need to use exiftool to adjust the PEF header first.

Note that 4.10.1 is not yet officially released, but is available for public testing. If you find an issue, please inform Bibble so they can fix it in the release.
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