this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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A long long LOOOONG time ago I tried to screenshot a video in windows media player and the screenshot still changed when I moved or played the video. I often wonder if that was a fever dream or just some weird shit that was happening with really early tech. I remember being so mad because I just wanted a screenshot of a scene in the video and it wouldn't work lol
Not a fever dream, I remember this, too. You basically got a "transparent" image through which you could see the rendered live (or game, as it happened with those, too). As soon as you closed the video player/game, or saved and reloaded the image, the effect was gone and you were stuck with a... I think it was just a black image?
I think it just remapped the memory of the video process, but I could be way off...
Back then, there was less hardware acceleration for the regular desktop stuff. Probably it just copied the data from the software rendering, and there it just defined that this part of the screen was hardware accelerated and this region pointed to vram instead of regular RAM.
Yup. Wormholes in your memory.
I think this essentially predated GPUs?
I remember this from Win 95 and Win 98, maybe even XP? You usually had a GPU, but they were more simple than today's GPUs. Oftentimes they were on-board (in contrast to today's iGPUs that are part of the processor, not part of the mainboard).
In the very early times you had 3D cards like the 3Dfx Vodoo cards. Those could only render 3D. Your desktop and other programs were still rendered by your normal GPU or on-board graphics card. They did only render 3D. You had to put a small cable from the output of your regular GPU to your 3D card's input and then plug you monitor into the 3D card. While you didn't do 3D, the 3Dfx Vodoo would just output everything it received from your regular GPU. When you played a game, it would output whatever it rendered instead.
Dam, this is actually awesome, I actually wanted to do something similar to this but couldn't figure things out.
I need to try again, might be able to make a virtual desktop screen and make xrandr pipe that output to that window.
Basically the thing I wanted to make is kind of like the picture in picture mode we have in browsers but for anything. Like just have those app open in a different virtual window and only remap the portion you wanna see into a always on top window.
Omg it wasn't a fever dream! 🥹
IIRC media players used to do something like a green screen where they draw a rectangle of a certain color and then a separate process would decode the video and display it over the colored rectangle. So taking a screenshot of the media player would capture the colored rectangle and it'd also be targeted by the video renderer.
This is real. I first was mad too, but than I copied it into paint, made some kind of clipart TV around it, and made it my desktop background. After that I could open VLC, move the window into the right spot and minimize it. This was soo cool.
You've activated my hyperanalytical brain. I have to know exactly how that worked
I don't know the exact technicalities but you can think of it as there is a color that's "VLC video", like a green screen. VLC itself consists of a window filled with this color and projects the video to the coordinates. Once you minimize the window, the video disappears, not because it isn't projected anymore, but because there is no "projection surface", except if the color happens to appear somewhere, be it paint or the background. I hope that makes it clear as far as I myself understand it.
Fascinating. Follow up question, did your computer have a second graphics card for 3D graphics/decoding video?
This is almost 2 decades ago, so I doubt it