[vtkusers] Writing image files

[Gib Bogle]

I managed to build VTK with MPEG2 library support by adding the required info in 
  Visual Studio, then found that the default image quality is too poor for my 
purposes anyway (and it isn't obvious how this can be controlled), so now I'm 
exploring writing out each frame for later assembly into a movie outside the 
program.

I can create BMP and TIFF files, but with essentially identical code the program 
crashes while executing writer->write() using vtkPNGWriter and vtkJPEGWriter. 
The failure message (Windows XP) is the cryptic "ABM_GUI.exe has encountered a 
problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience."  I can see 
that the crash occurs when the write() is executed.

Is there some obvious reason why JPEG and PNG writing should fail while BMP and 
TIFF succeed?  The former pair require compression - is there an issue of 
setting the compression parameters?