[vtkusers] ChoosePixelFormat failed error

[David Gobbi]

Hi Mark,

I've seen this sort of ChoosePixelFormat issue before, it seems
to occur sometimes when VTK is used together with a GUI toolkit,
and is even more likely when a wrapper-language is involved.

As far as I understand it, when the VTK render window is
embedded within a GUI window (in your case, the Java
canvas/panel), the GUI sometimes generates a window that has
a pixel format that is incompatible with VTK, and then embeds
a vtkRenderWindow in that window.

For VTK/wxPython, I remember having to do lots of tweaks in
order to get wx and VTK to play nice with each other.  My
debugging technique was to add print statements to the code
on both the GUI side and the VTK side when either one of them
made any calls related to setting up Windows, so that I could
make sure that everything was happening in the correct order.

It seems like a waste now, since I never really used wx after
that.   Anyways, a similar technique could be used to sort out
what VTK/Java might be doing wrong.

 - David


On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Mark Roden <mmroden at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have vtk 5.9 (git sync to head) wrapped in java, compiled in vs2008
> release mode.  Every three to five times I run my app (three
> imageviewer2 objects, one vtkSmartVolumeMapper to a 3D rendering), I
> get a ChoosePixelFormat error that crashes the program abruptly when
> running on Windows 7 64 bits.
>
> What's going on here?  If it's a driver bug, it's persistent across
> three different machines with three different graphics cards (one is a
> homebuilt machine, the other two are laptops).  Is there a way to
> debug this?  It's becoming a showstopping bug.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
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