Really wierd thing I noticed In winXP SP1

I don't have a question a such but I have noticed something weird in windows that I would like someone to try and see if they get the same thing and possibly offer an reason as to why it's happening.

I don't really know how to explain what's happening but I'll try.
What happens is if I take a screenshot of my desktop while mediaplayer is playing a movie or music with those weird effects and then paste the screenshot into paint, the screenshot still plays the movies instead of showig a still from the movie.
Furthermore if I now save a bitmap from within paint and open it in photoshop the movie is still playing. Then I tried saving the bitmap as a gif (using photoshops 'save for web'") with only 2 colours. Then opened the gif in mozilla and surely enough the whole image is only 2 colours (white and blue) except the part of the image that shows meadiaplayer, which is full colour and still playing the movie.
Also it's not that the image is playing a movie, rather it's that the image acts transparent and if media player is playing in the background the image shows the movie in the background. If the movie is not playing the image just shows a black screen.

So how can a gif or bitmap play a movie within itself?

Anyway could someone please try see if they get the same thing.
What I did was:
1. Play a movie in media player.
2. While the movie is playing take a screenshot using the "Print Screen" button on the keyboard.
3. Without minimising mediaplayer open up paint or any other image editor and paste in the screenshot.
4. save the image.

Voila! now anywhere you view that image you will be able to watch a movie in it as long as meadiaplayer is running.

Also I attached the two screenshots (smaller versions). The first a jpg and the second a 2 colour gif. Could someone please try running a movie and without minimising it open one of the attached images and see if you can see the movie through the picture.

Also I tried this on my winXP SP1 and Win2000 machines and both show the movie that's playing.

Thanks and sorry for such a useles thread but I'm interested if anyone else gets the same thing. And if so does the screenshot have to be taken on the same computer or can you view movies through the screenshots I took.

The reason I find this intersting is because it is theoreticaly impossible.
Thanks and sorry once again.

[EDIT]
Whoops only 1 attachment allowed. I added the gif only then.
Also I just checked and this doesn't hapen with jpg files. I does happen with gif's and bmp's though. I fogot to mention as well that if for instance media player is the first application running then on top of that you have IE running then the image in paint, photoshop or IE, then the image will look through the application it's running in, throught IE and show the movie playing in mediaplayer.

And another weird thing is is that the gif is only suppost to have 2 colours (white and blue) but it shows black in the center of the media player part of the image except when a movie is playing in which case its transparent and shows the movie.
[/EDIT]

ok got on a xp pro machine w/sp1 and could not make this situation happen, do you have media player 9? if so it was a true pain in the A$$ , i went back to the 8 that xp installs, 9 did alot of freaky things, it seems to be better on 2k3, but i dont use it much, and have not had the os long either.

wow, thats scary.. i have a movie playing in paint...

take the attachment image, and open media player and watch a movie file. the movie will be playing in the image...

>> Known_criminal
Actually i'm using Player 8 as well. I too find 9 a bit odd. As for why you don't get the same thing... I don't know, this whole thing is weird to me.

>> John5788
I'm glad to hear that someone else gets the same thing. I was begining to think It was something wrong with all my systems.... It's really freaky, right?
Just for gits and shiggles I set the screenshot as my wallpaper and now I see dead people...I mean movies on my desktop. Really weird but fun.

Anyway please if anyone else is bored and has some spare time please see what happens when you try to replicate this.

Oh... And thanks to both of you for trying.

i dont have a clue, i couldnt make it do it on 4 different machines, maybe just the way i set them up. tried with different hardware setups also.

Just a thought, but it might have something to do with Nvidia drivers/cards. I tried it on a similair system at work and no joy.

The only real difference was that it had a bog standard graphics card.

Also in the past I remmember other weird, "slighlty" similar, things happening after upgrading drivers, and it's stuck ever since.

Still thanks for trying. Thoguh the main reasons I posted were just to see a) to see if anyone else gets it, and b) to see if anyone thought it was as weird as I did.

I thought it was worthy of being a story for the granchildren....maybe not.

I guess it's just another one of those weird and wonderful "tricks" computers are doing.

A really weird thing this is.

I managed to get that background thing with paint and with every warez where i opened that gif while playing a movie on wmp v9b3008 over WinXP-SP1.

I even thought that this gif was a gef - graphics esoteric format, but then i decided that there is no such format. Maybe this strange behaviour should be related to wmp itself.

I took that mysterious black colour from that mystic gif, witch by the way is RGB(16,0,16), and found that, any object painted with that colour on win, makes the "bg trick", even in Word or Excel!

I guess that this solves the puzzle: RGB(16,0,16), acts as a mask for wmp while playing movies, and by the way, this is precisely the colour of the movie area.

Regarding whether or not is a hardware issue, i don't think so, because i have a ATI Radeon 9000 Pro witch is a non nvidia GPU.

My guess is: This is one of those 0-sec programming techniques that make the code work over the dead line

Hint: If anyone would like to see a movie while writing a letter, just use MS Word + text colour = RGB(16,0,16) + 72pt Bold + wmp playing behind.

RGB(16,0,16)? cool I'll look into that.
I did actually think it was something to do with a certain colour being used as a mask. But I didn't look into what exact colour it was, I thought it was just plain black.

Still thanks for the reply. It's good to have an explaination of some sort... I hate it when things can only be described as 'weird'.

[edit]
Just tried rgb(16,0,16) and true enough it shows WMP in the background.

I wonder if we were the first people to notice this.
How many people have had a movie playing whilst using that colour somewhere? I wonder....
[/edit]

Yeah I think this has to do with screen capture protection that many video formats and media players use so that you cannot take screenshots from the video itself.

No, that's not a kind of protection. It's "hardware acceleration" . Plus a shortcoming in the screen capture code of windows. The "overlay" picture will not be captured unless you disable hardware acceleration (then it will not use the hardware overlay but draw every single frame to the video card's memory manually). Also, DirectDraw overlays won't be captured either.
No protection. There is third-party software like eg. "Camtasia" that will capture it.

The overlay driver code is using a color mask to find the place where to overlay the picture. This is (from your description) the RGB(16,0,16). If you move the media player window on a slower PC, you'll see the picture flicker with black/video (blue/video for some drivers, purple / video for others - this seems to be yours). And the video will be moving slower around on the screen than the window. Looks funny.

M.