Discovered: Run A Video In An Image

Question

okay i have found the way to run a video in a image.... the procedure as given below

1 - Run a video in Windows Media Player

2 - While the video running, Press Print Screen

3 - Paste it in MS Paint

4 - Save the image in JPEG or BMP format

5 - Run any video in Windows Media Player again

6 - Now open that image, in Windows Page\Fax Viewer or ACDsee etc.

7 - at this time the win. media player is playing and the image is open

8- Switch to image (focus on image) and you will see the currently running video in the image

can anybody with extensive knowledge of windows tell me why does this happen.

Well this doesn't work in all versions of windows and media players. i tried this on the follwing setup

Windows Media Player 10

Windows XP 2006 SP2

Answer 1

Just to give a concise answer rather than a comment: This behavior depends both on the player you are using and on your graphics card. What happens is the following:

1. The video player fills its video window with a single, flat color. Usually, this will either be a bright pink or something close to, but not exactly, black. The idea is to choose a color that is not likely to appear anywhere else on screen.
2. The video player instructs the acceleration chip on your graphics card to play back the video, but to display it only on parts of the screen that have that exact color. To achieve this, a technique called "overlay" is used, which effectively allows the graphics card to "overlay" video content on any part of the screen that is filled with this particular color.

Now, if you took a screenshot of the player while it way playing, what you have is an image that contains a large uniform fill where the video is supposed to be. If you display this screenshot while playing the video, the graphics card will not be able to tell the difference between the solid color within the player and a screenshot of it. It will just replace this color with the video.

You can have fun with this behavior by drawing onto the screenshot. Whatever you drew will appear to be drawn on top of the video, because the video only shows wherever the screen has the exact color used by the video player.