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Windows used to secretly use green screens to render videos, which is how you could trick MS Paint into becoming a video player (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 4 months ago by cm0002 to c/windows@sopuli.xyz

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If you opened up the ol' Windows Media player back in the 95, 98 or XP days, brace yourself for a mild shock: it was lying to you.

And by lying, well, what I really mean is rendering video somewhere other than inside the actual window that was open on your desktop—sort of a parallel plane of existence to the desktop you were actually looking at—before sneakily porting it over

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[–] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 5 points 4 months ago

I always assumed this was due to the bandwidth of interfaces at the time. It would be to much for the hardware decoder to copy the output back for compositing. Thus the card rendered directly onto a mask.