Transparency Supported?

[The Tranquil Tana]

Hey there. I am attempting to make a wallpaper that is essentially just an overlay of whatever is underneath it.

For instance, I have a .mov of cortana doing an idle animation. Everything except for her is transparent.

However, whenever I attempt to overlay the .mov file in front of something, it replaces the transparent area with black.

Does anyone know of a way to get past this? I would like to be able to have whatever wallpaper I currently choose to have, but always have Cortana on top of it.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[Tim]

Video files generally do not support transparency, so this is not possible (also not any other way with Wallpaper Engine).

[butcho]

There are some video formats that support an alpha channel like mov, flv or even the old avi format has a fake alpha transparency. I use it often to export stuff in After Effects as an avi file and import it into Photoshop to generate a GIF for Wallpaper Engine. Works pretty good except for the usual limitations of the GIF format.

But i never tried videos with alpha channel in Wallpaper Engine, so i don´t know if that is even possible.

[Tim]

Ah yeah, I remember now seeing this in Adobe products, I have to admit I figured it was some semi-proprietary thing which Adobe does (because .mov, .flv and .avi are technically just "container formats"). Anyway, as far as I know, the Microsoft Media Foundation we utilize does not support this and neither do web-based solutions we employ for some video formats. If I am utterly mistaken, I am happy to be corrected though!

[The Tranquil Tana]

Thank you two for answering my question. It’s unfortunate that it won’t work, but there’s still plenty of other cool stuff I’ve found in wallpaper engine.

[Squee]

Some halfbaked option:

Webm transparency works within a webwallpaper, but you would have to add the video manually to each wallpaper individually. Could do that with these steps:

1. Duplicating the webwallpaper ( to avoid updates overwriting your changes )
2. Adding your video to the folder
3. Adding a line something like this into the html file

<video src="video.webm" autoplay loop style="position: fixed; top: 0; left:0; width: 100%; height: 100%; z-index: 1000" ></video>


You might be able to find some application you can use in combination with WE to overlay all wallpapers but I wouldn't know one. Rainmeter doesn't support video I believe.

For windows 7 ( and a bit of a stretch ), the gadgets that windows 7 and vista supported can be built with html and support transparency. But I think the webrenderer it uses might be to old to support transparent videos ( though gif's might work ). But those were discontinued after windows 7 I believe.

[The Tranquil Tana]

Thanks! I may try that!

[Suthriel]

Originally posted by ultio:

Video files generally do not support transparency, so this is not possible (also not any other way with Wallpaper Engine).

Would it be possible, that you build or install some sort of extra transparency or alpha layer/mask, which will use any regular supported video as an alpha/transparency, that we put in it? Maybe if it just automatically make it a greyscale video (desaturation), and uses its black and white values as indicator, how much transparent all the regions have to be.
With such a layer, it would not matter, if the video itself contain an alpha channel, as the extra layer would create it.

[butcho]

Guess that would not work so well. It´s like keying a certain color out. What if you choose black as transparent and other black parts in the video should not be transparent? Nothing beats a real alpa channel imho

[Suthriel]

Originally posted by butcho:

Guess that would not work so well. It´s like keying a certain color out. What if you choose black as transparent and other black parts in the video should not be transparent? Nothing beats a real alpa channel imho

This of course would work best, if the users make their own "transparency"-Videos for those layers, which contain the alpha mask in video form. Many animated b/w pictures, that work together with the coloured video.
Such a thing is pretty easy with 3D software, they can create the fitting alpha channels (as b/w pictures or video sequences) durning their normal renderings. I am pretty sure, this can be done with a better video editing software too.

So you are right, that this would not work so well with normal videos, that would be used for both color and alpha mask, or that are not made exactly for this purpose. But even "not so well" is better than no support for this feature ^.^

If using separate video files as alpha/transparency masks, the only requirement would be, that those two videos need to be linked somehow, so that both of them would play at the same time, even if some random events occur (like shuffeling through several videos to create a random playlist within the screensaver).
This would allow several animated layers in front of an animated background image.

[Tim]

Since Wallpaper Engine relies on Microsoft's Media Foundation, we cannot really add any such features to video playback. Creating our own media framework for Windows in order to add a feature like that is also pretty overkill and nothing which will realistically happen, so I definitely don't want to create any false hope here and rather be straight about it.