Offscreen Rendering (Unix Platforms Only)

When AVS/Express is started with the -offscreen flag, no visible windows will be created. For this mode to be useful, you will need to prepare a non-interactive application using normal Express faculties. The application might automatically loop over its input or the application might read commands from a script file or receive commands from another program via a network connection, but it is crucial that the application can run normally without any user input from a UI.

Note the following:

• Offscreen mode only works with the OpenGL and Software renders.
• The AG kit does not work in offscreen mode.
• The VPS and VRML renderers render to an output file instead of a display, so these are not affected by offscreen mode.
• The Open GL renderer may be slower in offscreen mode. When AVS/Express renders into an offscreen OpenGL pixmap, typically the OpenGL acceleration implemented in the video hardware will not be available.
• AVS/Express must be run on a machine that has a running X server. This is true even when using the AVS/Express software renderer. There are software packages such as Xvfb that can provide a X server even on a machine with no video hardware.
• The only palette mode available is 32 bit true color, which should not be a problem for applications that use the default palette mode.
• Offscreen mode is only available in Developer's edition of AVS/Express or in AVS/Express runtimes created with the Developer's edition.