Get Pixel-Values on Screen (KDE)

[Christian Ehrlicher]

Clean your build directory after switching from Qt5 to Qt6 and use Qt6::Foo instead Qt::Foo to be sure to use the Qt6 libs.

Member access into incomplete type 'QScreen'

As always - when you want to use a class you have to include the header where the class is defined.

[tim-hilt]

@Christian-Ehrlicher I might really have included the wrong header! Thanks for pointing that out.

As for the build directory: I see the error even if I delete the build-directory and configure Cmake on a clean slate. Anything else I can check?

[Christian Ehrlicher]

Since you did not show the whole CMakeLists.txt you did not tell us that you're also trying to link against KDE5 libs - this will not work you can't mix Qt5 and Qt6.

[tim-hilt]

@Christian-Ehrlicher does that mean the idea of @wrosecrans won‘t work?

[Christian Ehrlicher]

@tim-hilt said in Get Pixel-Values on Screen (KDE):

does that mean the idea of @wrosecrans won‘t work?

It does if you use the qt-5 docs instead the qt-6 ones

[tim-hilt]

@Christian-Ehrlicher thanks. That did in fact work.

[tim-hilt]

@Christian-Ehrlicher @wrosecrans The original question is answered so I marked the thread as solved. However, allow me to ask one more question:

My ultimate goal is to find the most prominent color in the first row of pixels in a window. My current, naive implementation looks like this:

  QScreen *screen = QGuiApplication::primaryScreen();
  auto window = screen->grabWindow(0).toImage(); // Convert to QImage

  // I have no way to debug, so I'm logging to journalctl
  syslog(LOG_NOTICE, "[Window Decoration] Width: %d, Height: %d",
         window.width(), window.height());

  std::unordered_map<QRgb, unsigned int> cols{};

  for (int i = 0; i < window.width(); i++) {
    cols[window.pixel(i, 0)]++; // Count color-occurences
  }

However the above code always logs, that the window is 0x0 pixels, so no pixel-value can actually be observed. Should I open another thread for this issue? Any idea what could have gone wrong? I added a 500ms delay before calling the above code, but that didn't change the behavior.

Here you can see the code in context.

[mpergand]

@tim-hilt
I'm using this kind of code:

       QScreen* screen=qApp->primaryScreen();
       screen=window()->windowHandle()->screen();
       if(!screen) return;
       QPoint pt=window()->geometry().topLeft();
       auto pixmap= screen->grabWindow(this->winId(), pt.x(),pt.y(),300,height());
       auto color = pixmap.toImage().pixelColor(2,2);
       qDebug()<<hex<<color<<color.rgb();

[tim-hilt]

Hi @mpergand, thanks for the reply. It seems like you have an instance of QGuiApplication that you hold in the variable qApp. I unfortunately don't have any of that. I generally don't really understand your code. Why are you initializing screen with one value, if it's directly overwritten in the second line?

I logged the screen-name that I get when using QGuiApplication::primaryScreen(). It prints eDP-1, which is my laptop-screen. So I correctly get the screen. The issue thus seems to happen when I use grabWindow. screen->grabWindow(0) should grab the pixels of the entire screen, but that doesn't seem to be the case for me.

I also tried screen->grabWindow(QApplication::activeWindow()->winId()) to get the window-id of the currently active window, but that just crashes KDE.

I'm unfortunately out of ideas for now. Any idea what else I could try?

[mpergand]

@tim-hilt said in Get Pixel-Values on Screen (KDE):

Why are you initializing screen with one value, if it's directly overwritten in the second line?

You're right, that's old (test) code that I don't use because grab() doesn't work well:

• the colors of the grabbed image are ligther then the original
• there's a strange redraw bug on the original window after the grab operation (at least on mac)

Try with a portion of the screen:
auto pixmap= screen->grabWindow(winId,100,100,200,200);

In my opinion, the grab method is not really reliable.

[tim-hilt]

@mpergand the pixmap-size is still 0x0 pixels, even if I call grabWindow with coordinates. In my application I call .toImage() on the returned pixmap. However both the pixmap and the image are both of size 0x0 pixels. So it also doesn't get lost in the conversion-process from pixmap to image.

[mpergand]

Test on KDE 21.04 in virtualbox.

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{    
 QApplication app(argc, argv);

  QWidget w1;
  w1.show();
  w1.resize(300,200);

  QTimer::singleShot(500, 0,[&w1]()
     {
      QScreen *screen = QGuiApplication::primaryScreen();
      auto screen_img = screen->grabWindow(0).toImage();
      qDebug()<<screen_img;
      auto win_img= screen->grabWindow(w1.winId());
      qDebug()<<win_img;
     }
 );
 return app.exec();
}

QImage(QSize(1891, 972),format=QImage::Format_RGB32,depth=32,devicePixelRatio=1,bytesPerLine=7564,sizeInBytes=7352208)
QPixmap(QSize(300, 200),depth=32,devicePixelRatio=1,cacheKey=0x700000001)

Work as expected.

[tim-hilt]

@mpergand can you provide a CMakeLists.txt or the compile-command you used?

and just to make that clear: I’m using the same code distilled to

QScreen *screen = QGuiApplication::primaryScreen();
auto screen_img = screen->grabWindow(0).toImage();

So no app.exec or something like that. That shouldn’t matter however, since screen->name did resolve to the expected screen name.

If you have the capacity, you could try running my code (linked above). It‘s actually a window-decoration for KDE! The Readme contains installation-instructions and I added logs that you can read through journalctl.

[tim-hilt]

Some more news about this:

1. I used qDebug to log the returned object for QScreen::grabWindow. It prints QPixmap(null)! So the grabWindow-function doesn't seem to work on my machine. Versions are printed below.
2. I can observe the same behavior when compiling and running the Screenshot-Example that you guys were referring to earlier. When I execute the compiled binary and try to take a screenshot, this is the output I'm getting:

$ ./screenshot
QPixmap::scaled: Pixmap is a null pixmap
QPixmap::scaled: Pixmap is a null pixmap
QPixmap::scaled: Pixmap is a null pixmap

Versions:

qt5-base: 5.15.7+kde+r177-1
kwin_wayland --version: kwin 5.26.4
plasmashell --version: plasmashell 5.26.4
uname -a: Linux t14s 6.1.1-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 21 Dec 2022 22:27:55 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

@Christian-Ehrlicher can you give me your guess as to where this issue should be further pursued? Is it likely due to Arch Linux, KDE or Qt?

[tim-hilt]

I have since found out that grabWindow doesn’t work under Wayland. So I either have to find another way or resort to X11 again.