The mysterious color that lets you see videos!!!
I was just fooling around on my computer and I came across a strange color. Whenever you have a video playing in Windows Media Player, this color will become transparent no matter what program you are in, and let you see through to the video.
You probably don't understand what I am talking about. Let me give you a few examples. Don't close your browser right now, because this REALLY WORKS!
Example 1:
Open Windows Media Player, start playing a video, and resize it so it takes up a large portion of the screen. (I have tested this with .avi and .wmv and they both work.) It must take up the same area of the screen as the box below. Now, without minimizing Windows Media Player, go down to your taskbar and open up your browser. If the video is positioned correctly, you should see your video in the image below (scroll up and down until you can see your video.)
Example 2: (Paint)
Open up paint. Click colors > edit colors > define custom colors. Then type these color values and click OK....
Now play a video in Windows Media Player and have it take up a large portion of the screen. Switch back into paint without minimizing WMP. Now take any tool in paint and start drawing. You will see your video playing whereever you drew.
Example 3: (Photoshop)
Open up Photoshop and do the same thing you did in example 2, but type these values into the color picker:
posted by geek284 at
2:14 PM
17 Comments:
Thats pretty amazing!
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its called an overlay color, thats the default overlay color for windows media player, some other media players may have other overlay colors. for more fun, get winamp and AVS plugin and go into its overlay settings, you can set its overlay color to what ever you want.
Also neat to mention that it doesn't work with Windows Vista / IE7 / WMP 10. Perhaps the desktop compositing engine no longer relies of an overlay color in Vista? Or maybe the color has just changed.
Hmm, now to make subliminal mesages that only show up when people are watching videos.
I wonder if you can find similar colors with Macs, or if there is a different color that would produce the same result with Vista.
It works with the black square on this page and when I draw with that color in MS Paint, but for some reason not when I do it in photoshop.
It doesn't work on Os X ;)
It's how every computer-based DVD player I've ever used works. Now you know.
I understood the idea of an overlay color, I just didn't know it's values. Thanks for sharing this.
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Yeah, it will also work when viewing thumbnails in windows explorer. You can also do the same thing in microsoft paint. It's been around a while, but it's still a pretty neat trick :).
wow, you must be some kind of genious... 'mysterious color'...
For all those who aren't able to repeat this magic - printscreen -> paste into ms paint :)
There used to be a "bug" in the video driver of early versions of OSX. I spent many an hour in Terminal watching a movie through whatever I was working on.
I remember doing something similar on a Mac Quadra 660AV circa 1993. I was able to play video in a Macromedia Director movie. I thought it was pretty awesome at the time.
I saw this a cuple of years ago when I tried to printscreen a film in winamp.
Older video players use the overlay mixer to display video. Newer ones use VMR7 or VMR9, some use OpenGL. The overlay mixer is the system default in systems older then and including XP.
Wow, you've flaunted an impressive unfamiliarity with video overlays. Congrats.
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