well, since you are on the subject 
i am writing this in longhorn, and recording a video for anybody who would like to watch it, gimme an ftp or something to upload it to and its all urs.
i havent seen any of those animated windows yet.
this is really neato.
the animated windows aren't in the longhorns you can download, that was in a lab build.
The longhorns you can download don't have any of the special new features like winfs/DX desktop, so they're really just glorified XPs (imo)
hey fissy, i am done making hte video now. its 20 min long, weighing in @ 40 megs.
so if anybody wants it. lemme know i will upload it to them. and if you can host it that would be swell too .
thanks for the info fissy, i didnt know that. 
Someone who has the main build has demonstrated to me that you can snapshot a desktop with video window in it without turning off overlay (acceleration) in WMP. And it's alt-tab does live screenshots of the windows. There is even an option which is currently greyed out of popping up a live snapshot of a minimized window when you mouseover the task. So I think it does have some of the DX stuff but not all, like the new animations and junk.
All of that stuff you can't do in XP because of the old windowing system which doesn't render offscreen stuff and the way video has to be overlayed. Though I do know of one program at least (wintv) that uses a special overlay in XP (the transparency one) which lets it snapshot normally.
The reason you cant take pics of Movies normally is because it is being rendered by the video card, and Windows only takes snapshots of whats being software rendered. (If thats what you said, then I just wasnt smart enough to understand you)
Originally posted by contrasutra@May 10 2003, 11:25 PMThe reason you cant take pics of Movies normally is because it is being rendered by the video card, and Windows only takes snapshots of whats being software rendered. (If thats what you said, then I just wasnt smart enough to understand you)
So THATS the reason...
I always thought it was for copyright reasons..
I think you got it pretty much. Let me explain some more though. Normally on windows with videos the desktop gets "rendered" and then the video seperately and then it gets "overlayed" into the blank box. That's why normally videos show up blank when you take a shot of them.
Transparency in windowsXP\2k is actually another newer type of overly which can be screenshotted normally (but not by some screenshotting programs). WinTV uses this as it's overlay method as an option but the drawback is that if you put something that is transparent over it they kind of fight.
However, in longhorn that is all irrelevant because of the 3d interface. Which renders everything onto polygons rather than using overlay surfaces. This also allows things like live snapshots of things that aren't onscreen because they are always being rendered where on XP or below they are not. I read that the VWM in the sidebar takes advantage of this as well.
the edit button dissapeared <_<
Anyway so when you turn off acceleration in WMP to snapshot it in XP or below you turn off it's overlay surface support which allows it to be snapshotted normally.
So no it has nothing to do with copyright and more to do with how they chose to do it to get more performance out of older machines playing videos.
Yeah, listen to Smoke, he's the GUI expert. And he uses the GIMP, so hes one of the "good" ones.
The "overlays" are also why if you move WMP or something really quickly, the video cant keep up, right? 
Yeah because they are being rendered seperately and then composited together so.. when you move the window the video has to be syncronized to it.
I've actually seen instances where if you move a window and it's not playing it doesn't move in the overlay surface to match it until you hit play.
I almost forgot to mention this is also why you can't transperize a titlebar seperate from the window in XP or 2k because the entire window gets put into a transparency overlay surface. The windows docks use 2+ seperate windows layered and grouped.
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