Windows DreamScene Options

[impala454]

went back to vista 64 today, noticed one of the "ultimate extra" features is in there now, called DreamScene. Very cool. It's not really much more than a video that shows on your background, but the ones it comes with are pretty sweet, here's a SS:



it's hard to really see whats its doing in a ss, but it's continuously moving. there's another one with a moving stream and a few others. doesn't seem to degrade performance at all, even while running other videos.

and before anyone starts, yes i'm sure linux/mac/other have had something like this since like 1972. i just thought it was pretty neat. gives a bad ass feel to the system. like it's alive or somethin.

just another lil side note, looks like there's x64 drivers for all my stuff now, so the thing is spinnin like a top. if there's any software someone wants to know works or not let me know and maybe i can try it for you.

[Seeker]

impala uses IE, teehee

[zetec]

funny thing, is I did this with active desktop back in... lets see, 1999 or 1998 so it had to be Windows 98. Maybe 98SE.

It was easy. Made a simple webpage that played an embedded (local) video with no media player controls and set that as the active desktop background. I used to run the FF8 teaser trailer on loop (that's how I remember the date; FF8 came out in 99 I believe.), and it really wasn't quite the resource hog you'd have expected it to be.

And what with overlays nowadays, it's even easier and more efficient. Hell, even Winamp will do it for you.

Microsoft gets no kudos on this one. None at all.

edit: oh and save your time, Spidey 3 blows.

This post has been edited by zetec: May 21 2007, 11:23 PM

[chook]

spidey goes emo. The girl i took to it said it was a chick flick.

[impala454]

funny thing, is I did this with active desktop back in... lets see, 1999 or 1998 so it had to be Windows 98. Maybe 98SE.

I know what active desktop is... it didn't look this good... and you weren't playing 1600x1200 videos on your active desktop. like i said, hard to really see in a still shot. It's funny that I put a disclaimer that I KNOW this is nothing new, and you still chime in with your jackass response.

And what with overlays nowadays, it's even easier and more efficient. Hell, even Winamp will do it for you.

so winamp will continously play a 1600x1200 movie as my background?

Microsoft gets no kudos on this one. None at all.

I wasn't trying to give Microsoft kudos... all I said was I thought it was neat... I really don't understand you guys sometimes, it's like I've offended you by posting something that I find interesting. Give it a f'n rest.

edit: oh and save your time, Spidey 3 blows.

I saw it in the theater before I downloaded it.. I enjoyed it. sorry you didn't.

and heh chuck, yeah I loled when he did the little hair flip thing to switch to "bad" spidey. I wouldn't necessarily call it a chick flick, although there definitely are some chick moments.

[zetec]

woah, calm down. i wasn't knocking you, i was knocking microsoft. for the extra hundred bucks for ultimate i'd expect more than a simple DX10-boosted video overlay.

and for the record, yeah, winamp will do that.

So will VLC now that I think about it.

[impala454]

?? why the hell would winamp control my desktop background? guess i'm confused

[zetec]

winamp can play videos on an overlay, as well as visualizations (which i think personally is cooler than dreamscene). Then it just sets your desktop (temporarily, only while winamp is open and the option is enabled) to the overlay color (defaults to some super never used reddish color, but you can change the color. It's kinda cool to set it to like white or black and have all your text be hippie-dippie-color-changing an stuffs) and it plays the video on everything that's set as the overlay color.


VLC will do it too.

edit: i was gonna post a screencap, but overlays don't show up on screencaps unless i disable all hardware accelleration, and i don't wanna slow my machine to a crawl just to screencap a visualization . The good thing is since it's an overlay, there's absolutely zero performance loss.

This post has been edited by zetec: May 22 2007, 04:43 PM

[impala454]

weird... never knew about that. guess i'm just old school with winamp and pretty much just use it to listen to music. although I have used the visualizations in winamp on the MCE comp at parties before (the tripex one was f'n sweet lookin on a 51" big screen at 1920x1080 res).

[zetec]

weird... never knew about that. guess i'm just old school with winamp and pretty much just use it to listen to music. although I have used the visualizations in winamp on the MCE comp at parties before (the tripex one was f'n sweet lookin on a 51" big screen at 1920x1080 res).

funny thing is that the overlay thing has actually been in winamp since 2.xx.

the overlay for video (and video period) is new. I only use winamp for music as well, VLC for any kind of movies.