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I remember a time where Windows Media Player would sometimes do video playback by just drawing a very specific "close-to-black" RGB color in it's window and the

I remember a time where Windows Media Player would sometimes do video playback by just drawing a very specific "close-to-black" RGB color in it's window and then let the hardware impose the decoded video on to that part of the screen with that color. I could then open up MS Paint and draw my own custom shaped "window" into my video playback with that color by laying it on top of the WMP window.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Yes, that's Video Overlay: when the video is not rendered to the framebuffer but actually to the output signal directly. It was replaced by VMR (Video Mixing Renderer) which allows video to be rendered to each parent windows' offscreen DWM buffer. The funny thing is that overlays are coming back (soon, I hope!) - not for performance reasons, but because using a compositing window manager like the DWM introduces an additional frame of latency, but if a foreground window is being displayed 1:1 on the desktop then the GPU can simply overlay it directly to the output signal and thus eliminate that frame of latency. Some Linux WMs support it already, and Microsoft said they're working on it.