Michael Wed Aug 6 15:10:49 2003
Rubicon hereby crossed
I bought my first DVD today.
I can see how people might get into this technology. Up until now I've resisted, partly as a feeble protest against the MPAA, but mostly because I'm a skinflint and a curmudgeon.
In my defense, the (two!) DVDs I bought are both East Bloc children's cartoons, one native Hungarian (Vizipok) and the other Czech (The Little Mole). The Little Mole rocks. The Little Mole, for my wife, is roughly what, oh, Captain Kangaroo is to me. There was an evening cartoon for kids, every night at 6 PM. Everybody (and I mean everybody) watched it. It was on before the news. Imagine seeing a cartoon every evening before Walter Cronkite came on. It defies the imagination.
Anyway, the Little Mole was a frequent appearance on this (as was Vizipok). Get this: made in Czechoslovakia, it has *no words*. So they didn't need to translate anything. What I'm wondering is -- why was this never shown in America? It's so cool!
I'd love to capture a screen print for you. It appears, though, that DVD playing technology is "smarter" than that. Obviously I'm going to have to apply myself to figuring out how they trick the windowing system -- it would appear that the graphics are directly written to the screen precisely where the actual window of the player is; a screen print, therefore, just shows the blank space lying under the graphic. Interesting.
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gopher Thu Aug 7 21:31:26 2003
Re: Rubicon hereby crossed
> I'd love to capture a screen print for you. It appears, though, that DVD
> playing technology is "smarter" than that. Obviously I'm going
> to have to apply myself to figuring out how they trick the windowing
> system -- it would appear that the graphics are directly written to the
> screen precisely where the actual window of the player is; a screen print,
> therefore, just shows the blank space lying under the graphic.
> Interesting.
Yeah, DVD stuff is generally hardware scaled, hence it bypasses the usual window buffers and goes straight to the card. You're using Microsoft Windows, right? If you happen to have the DirectX developer kit (I don't, don't ask), you can put it in debug mode, effectively making /everything/ go up to the windows buffer before hitting the screen, slow everything to a crawl, and then get a shot that way. I don't know of any other windows alternatives. Maybe different players, or something, can take screenshots.
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Michael Fri Aug 8 05:25:40 2003
Re: Rubicon hereby crossed
> Yeah, DVD stuff is generally hardware scaled, hence it bypasses the usual
> window buffers and goes straight to the card.
That's what my Googling tells me, yes. There are a few (non-free) screen grabbers that do "DirectX screen capture", but frankly I have better things to do with my time this week -- not just paid work, but my wife has been on a writing binge lately with the dissertation, and Emsworth needs some work from me as well. So mucking around getting screen prints of my DVD somehow doesn't take terribly high priority.
Just take it from me that the Little Mole is really, really cool.
TWO DAYS until my journey to Germany. Woo!
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