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When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

devblogs.microsoft.com

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessary for blending in video overlays, and wasteful. Well, necessary inside the overlay if that is where the controls should appear. Alpha blending is two reads, one write per pixel, for the whole affected region (whatever that is, could be the whole screen). An opaque overlay is one read, one write, only for every pixel in the desired rectangle.

The video overlays in question are not drawn by blending into a framebuffer in memory. They're two separate display planes that are read in parallel by the display path, scaled, and blended together at scan-out time. There are only reads, no writes. Modern GPUs support alpha-blended display planes using the alpha channel that is otherwise often required to exist anyway as padding. As OP noted, using hardware display…

Yeah sorry, you're right of course: hardware planes are directly scanned out without going through the main framebuffer.

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#72
In the earlier days of graphics on Linux this was a common right of passage. As far back as 2003 I can remember running an i915 graphics driver, which Intel has always had pretty good open drivers. When you would open a video in VLC and take a screenshot of the desktop, you would be left with a hole as it would grab the overlay compositing color (blue, green, etc.). However, if X11 was doing a video thing it would be filling these areas with whatever video is happening.

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#73
post #55
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2005 is pre iPhone I hate how incompetent tech writing and marketing rewrote and simplified mobile phone history into pre/post-iphone. Yes, we did have touchscreens, smartphones and camera-enabled devices many years before the iPhone. Arguably, on several metrics, many Symbian/Linux/blackberry phones of that era are better smartphones than today's iPhone/Androids as defined by hardware capabilities which got remove…

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

I had an Ericsson R320s at the time and that was the web page that convinced me to replace it with a Nokia E70. The joystick stopped working after many years and there was no fix for it. I switched to E90 and I hated the keyboard. It took a lot of force to press the keys and there was no clear key separation to touch-type. But that was the phone which I dropped on the pavement while riding the bike at 80 Km/h and it survived with just scratches! The best 3 phones I ever had.

Now I have a N86 which I'm going to keep until the last 2G goes offline.

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#74
post #52

This reminds me of the time when Quake started rendering inside the start button of the Windows 95 desktop (or maybe Win 98). I wish I could remember the details but it think it was something to do with alt-tab.

That quirky effect is a known quirk of early DirectDraw/WinQuake on Windows 95/98. When a game grabbed the primary surface in certain modes, parts of the desktop GDI (like the Start button/taskbar) could briefly be overdrawn or show the game’s backbuffer due to how DirectDraw managed the primary surface and cooperative levels in fullscreen and windowed modes on those systems.

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#75
post #68
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any DRM protection where the OS sees the video is useless, because the OS is under full control of the user. (For now at least)

Not true about Android at least — there is secure boot where the bootloader will snitch on you if you unlock it, and you can't do anything about it because the attestation happens in a trusted execution environment, a hypervisor with higher privileges than the OS kernel, that you never get to unlock.

Android is unfortunately no longer an OS controlled by the user and that is very concerning.

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#76
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2005 is pre iPhone. While cameras were definitely common, they also weren't quiet as ubiquitous as they're today. Lots of families only had them for trips etc, not readily available for kids to make photos of screens.

Many flip phones had cameras by then. For instance, the Razr V3 was the best selling phone of 2005, and had a 640×480px camera.

If you think every student had a razr (btw good luck reading text on tiny screen photo from 640x480 camera) you're pretty privileged;)

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#77
post #73
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

I had an Ericsson R320s at the time and that was the web page that convinced me to replace it with a Nokia E70. The joystick stopped working after many years and there was no fix for it. I switched to E90 and I hated the keyboard. It took a lot of force to press the keys and there was no clear key separation to touch-type. But that was the phone which I dropped on the pavement while riding the bike at 80 Km/h and it…

haven't had a chance to try this myself, but i've been told e70's joystick simply needs disassembly and cleaning (perhaps with a judicious application of wd-40).

Re: When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it

#78
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Cameras didn't exist, more that the technological features were not sophisticated enough to enlist cheating compared to now. A personal OCR Python library wasn't a thing back then. Not saying that cheating was impossible but uneasy unlike to now where there's a library for everything.

AABBY FineReader was very pirate-able since the early 2000s. The workflow would have been a bit clunky, but it was still very doable.

if you are dedicated and smart enough to invest in a small camera pirate OCR software you can probably just do the assignment in the first place...
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