[HN Gopher] When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, t...
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       When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was
       playing in it
        
       Author : birdculture
       Score  : 120 points
       Date   : 2025-10-16 19:57 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
        
       | nomel wrote:
       | I made extensive use of this, when I found it by accident, in my
       | Winamp skins and GUI programs!
        
       | janwl wrote:
       | This unlocked some memories. I remember on my system the chroma
       | colour not being green but some very dark shade of grey that was
       | almost black but not really black... something like #010101
        
       | precommunicator wrote:
       | I've used that trick as far as Windows XP, playing videos inside
       | 3D models in programs like SketchUp
        
       | OCTAGRAM wrote:
       | This was a nice trick to protect text from copying. For instance,
       | student assignments. Students could still use digital camera on
       | CRT display, but 20 years ago cameras were costly and students
       | did not have them. And typing text from scratch was a tedious
       | job. So online served assignments were not shared too fast.
        
       | edgineer wrote:
       | "Nowadays, video rendering is no longer done with overlays."
       | 
       | Darn, I thought this explained why, after upgrading my GPU,
       | videos playing in Chrome have a thin green stripe on their right
       | edge.
        
         | jadamson wrote:
         | I did some Googling on your behalf as I remember having
         | something like that but can't reproduce it right now:
         | 
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1kovgdx/green_...
         | 
         | I'd make sure your drivers are up to date before fiddling with
         | Chrome flags though.
        
         | BearOso wrote:
         | Video rendering can still be done with overlays, but it's a
         | little more substantial, involving separate planes with the
         | locations configurable on the graphics card. Look up MPO,
         | Multi-Plane Overlay.
         | 
         | Your green stripe is likely because of the classic combination
         | of unclamped bilinear filtering and a texture that's larger
         | than the output region being used as the drawing surface for
         | the video.
        
       | dixie_land wrote:
       | Iirc you can also set that "green screen" as wallpaper and have
       | video as desktop background!
        
         | cluckindan wrote:
         | Or you could set the WinAmp AVS visualizer to render to
         | overlay, and have it as your desktop background.
        
       | 5- wrote:
       | i had forgotten about this technique when i was at the excellent
       | https://tnmoc.org recently, looking at their sgi irix exhibit
       | featuring a webcam.
       | 
       | the latency of the camera feed on the crt screen was unbelievable
       | even (especially?) by modern standards!
       | 
       | after a minute of pure wonder i remembered about overlays. still
       | mighty impressive.
        
       | halyconWays wrote:
       | I had a Matrox Millenium card with a breakout box for capturing
       | RCA, S-Video, and Cable TV; I'd watch TV on my Windows 98 SE2
       | computer, which was the craziest thing back then, but I always
       | felt like the green-screen like effect was some kind of
       | mysterious bug that I'd better not mess with, or video capture
       | would break. Windows 98 was barely working on a good day, so it
       | felt like the computer was in the process of failing in a
       | graceful and useful way, so I'd better not push my luck.
       | 
       | Every so often you could get a glimpse of the man behind the
       | curtain, by dragging the window quickly or the drivers
       | stuttering, which would momentarily reveal the green color (or
       | whatever color it was) before the video card resumed doing its
       | thing. Switching between full screen and windowed mode probably
       | also revealed the magic, or starting a game that attempted to
       | grab the video hardware context. And of course sometimes other
       | graphical content would have the exact right shade of color, and
       | have video-displaying pixels.
        
       | zaptheimpaler wrote:
       | If you watch Twitch, you can see that all instances of the same
       | emote in chat animate together. Then I tested this more generally
       | in a web page, and the same thing happens - if the same gif is
       | placed multiple times in a page, all instances of that gif will
       | play in sync even if loaded at different times. I guess there's a
       | similar idea in browsers then, where maybe there's only one
       | memory representation of the gif across the page or the browser.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-18 23:00 UTC)