Video Opacity

Does anyone know of a video playback system like winamp or windows media player with whic I can Lower the opacity of the entire video screen so as to see my other windows applications behind(ie through ) the Playing video?


Rory

I have no idea, but why does somebody would wanna do that at all?

I was just curious more than anything else?

I remember seeing some kind of demonstration by apple on the net of the desktop of the future as they saw it and it included all sorts of video on desktop sorts of things. It struck me that I have never sen a transparent video that wasn't mixing with some other video rather than with the current desktop.


Like I say idle curiosity really

Rory

There are a number of transparency window applications out there, for sure, and some applications (for example, the Instant Messenger app, Gaim) have that functionality built in.

Also, most nVidia and ATI cards have some transparency functionality built into the drivers, which can be set accordingly.  Its the one thing I miss since a recent switch from a nVidia GeForce 4 to a Radeon 9800 Pro is that the drivers don't allow you to make the taskbar transparent any more!

Have a search on one of the download sites such as download.com

I don't know of a video player that has transparency, but a per-app transparancy tool I've used on WinXP is Vitrite:

http://home.insightbb.com/~ryanvm/tinyutilities/vitrite/

Basically any player can do it today, but as such isn't very useful feature, the players rather opt for rendering methods that consume less cpu and these methods aren't well suited for opacity if at all.

An almamater of mine went so far as to make a stand-alone, commerical product out of this concept....for a Mac...

http://www.cesoft.com/products/translucy.html

Personally, I don't see the point...

aharden wrote:

I don't know of a video player that has transparency, but a per-app transparancy tool I've used on WinXP is Vitrite:

http://home.insightbb.com/~ryanvm/tinyutilities/vitrite/

For what it is worth, you could do this easily with a WPF app.  Setting the forum background to allow transparent and then adject opacity as needed.  All controls on the form inherit the opacity.  Makes for a nice effect.  Have to make your own form border if needed.  I could see a use for this.  Dock a vid in upper right, for example, set form to always ontop and let is play.

staceyw said:

For what it is worth, you could do this easily with a WPF app.  Setting the forum background to allow transparent and then adject opacity as needed.  All controls on the form inherit the opacity.  Makes for a nice effect.  Have to make your own form border if needed.  I could see a use for this.  Dock a vid in upper right, for example, set form to always ontop and let is play.

Way to ressurect a 5 yearold thread.

But the moment you alter the opacity of a video you have to stop using video overlay and have to go the slower path; on modern hardware this isn't a problem, but if you've got a lot of high-def video files being decoded open your system will ground to a halt.

W3bbo said:

staceyw said:

*snip*

Way to ressurect a 5 yearold thread.

 

But the moment you alter the opacity of a video you have to stop using video overlay and have to go the slower path; on modern hardware this isn't a problem, but if you've got a lot of high-def video files being decoded open your system will ground to a halt.

Dang...  Did not even see the date on that.  It was at the top of list.  How does that happen?  New posts have really droped off.  In any event this is still interesting in terms of wpf and transparent forms.

staceyw said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

Dang...  Did not even see the date on that.  It was at the top of list.  How does that happen?  New posts have really droped off.  In any event this is still interesting in terms of wpf and transparent forms.

There was a spam comment (one of them Video conversion ones) that has clearly been culled from the thread, it wasn't you who actually resurrected it even though it now looks like it was.

As far as the whole overlay thing goes, support for them was dropped in Vista IIRC, modern hardware can do just as well without them and they'd cause all sorts of issues for desktop composition.

AndyC said:

staceyw said:

*snip*

There was a spam comment (one of them Video conversion ones) that has clearly been culled from the thread, it wasn't you who actually resurrected it even though it now looks like it was.

 

As far as the whole overlay thing goes, support for them was dropped in Vista IIRC, modern hardware can do just as well without them and they'd cause all sorts of issues for desktop composition.

I think overlay is still supported (at least I'm fairly sure Media Player Classic and the likes can still use it if you tell them to), but it will disable the DWM if you ues it.