When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it
21 hours ago
- #VideoPlayback
- #ChromaKeying
- #Windows98
- Windows 98 used a green screen (chroma-keying) technique for video playback in media players.
- Media players rendered video by drawing solid green where video should appear and using a shared graphics surface with the graphics card.
- Graphics cards replaced green pixels with video pixels from the shared surface, allowing smooth playback.
- Screen captures showed green pixels where video was playing, as the overlay wasn't captured.
- Pasting the screenshot into Paint and resuming playback made the video play in Paint due to the active overlay.
- Overlays had limitations, such as lag when moving windows and limited support by graphics cards.
- Modern systems use desktop compositors instead of overlays for smoother video rendering and window management.
- Different users reported varying key colors (e.g., dark purple) depending on video card settings.
- Hardware overlays also enabled smooth resizing of video windows without CPU-intensive processing.
- This technique was last commonly observed in Windows XP before modern compositing took over.