ImportError DLL load failed 1 is not a valid Win32 application

Question

I have this issue where I try to import cv2 on python and get the following error message    gt  gt  gt  import cv2 Traceback  most recent call last   File   lt stdin gt    line 1  in  lt module gt  ImportError  DLL load failed   1 is not a valid Win32 application    I do understand there are many posts about this where it is suggested that the bitness of the package is different from the python package   However  everything I am running is 64 bits   I am on win7 64 bits  I have the winpython 2 7 3 3  64 bits distribution  and I compiled opencv in 64 bits with the instruction provided here and placed the cv2 pyd dll in the Lib site-packages folder of python     Unfortunately the suggestion of using the 32 bits version of python isn t working for me anymore as I have to handle numpy arrays too large for 32 bits   Thanks     ------   UPDATE  The only thing missing was to add the new opencv binaries path  C  opencv build bin Release  to the Windows PATH environment variable  restart python     Everything seems to be working fine now

User · Answer

I just hit this and the problem was that the package had at one point been installed in the per-user packages directory. (On Windows.) aka %AppData%\Python. So Python was looking there first, finding an old 32-bit version of the .pyd file, and failing with the listed error. Unfortunately pip uninstall by itself wasn't enough to clean this, and at this time pip 10.0.1 doesn't seem to have a --user parameter for uninstall, only for install.

tl;dr Deleting the old .pyd from %AppData%\python\python27\site-packages resolved this problem for me.

User · Answer

All you have to do is copy the cv2 pyd file from the x86 folder  C  opencv build python 2 7 x86   for example  to C  Python27 Lib site-packages    not from the x64 folder   Hope that help you

User · Answer

When I had this error  it went away after I my computer crashed and restarted  Try closing and reopening your IDE  if that doesn t work  try restarting your computer  I had just installed the libraries at that point without restarting pycharm when I got this error   Never closed PyCharm first to test because my blasted computer keeps crashing randomly    working on that one  but it at least solved this problem   little victories

User · Answer

The ImportError message is a bit misleading because of the reference to Win32  whereas the problem was simply the opencv DLLs were not found    This problem was solved by adding the path the opencv binaries to the Windows PATH environment variable  as an example  on my computer this path is   C  opencv build bin Release

User · Answer

You could try installing the 32 bit version of opencv

User · Answer

Or you have to rebuild the cv2 module for win 64bit

User · Answer

This error can also appear when python versions are mixed    For example if any of the DLL to be loaded has been compiled using python 2 7 16 and you try to import with python 2 7 15 this error ImportError  DLL load failed   1 is not a valid Win32 application  is thrown   This is at least what I ve found to be the problem in my case

[python] ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application

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