Fullscreen overlay mode

[dirkdeftly]

Okay, I searched the forum and came up with nothing of relevance - or, I should say, I *tried* to search the forum; apparently the search engine sucks donkey and I can't search for phrases (or at least it's not obvious how).
Anyway, I want to know what the hell fullscreen overlay mode does. I've fiddled with it for the last half hour and I still haven't figured it out.
(Deepest apologies if I missed a relevant thread but all the searches I tried turned up crap)

[S-uper_T-oast]

As far as I can guess it works just like regular Overlay mode but sets the whole screen to the overlay color.
I usually use fullscreen overlay mode and have only found one glitch with it, it sometimes freezes up winamp and doesn't go fullscreen, and then it locks up mostly everything and my screen gets really messy, but this rarely happens. Don't know if it was talked about anywere else though, don't care either.

[jheriko]

I think that all it does is use the hardware overlay for fullscreen in the same way that Windows Media Player uses it for fullscreen video. I can't see the use of it since it would mean that on a multi monitor system it would only draw avs to one monitor.. on the flipside it might be a more stable alternative to the regular fullscreen mode (I'm not 100% sure of this), which I have occasionally had problems with (like the drawing of the winamp window every other frame in the middle of my fullscreen avs).

[Zevensoft]

Fullscreen Overlay is also VERY fast compared to normal Fullscreen. Mainly because it uses your video cards acceleration to grab the AVS frame directly from the hDC and output it through the overlay filter, thus smoothing it or whatever your video card does to help overlays.

[jheriko]

Doesn't hDC = handle for Device Context, so how can you grab a frame from it? Surely it grabs the frame from the actual 'device', which I'd assume is the square of AVS window that is drawn to, which is probably a control which has a DC because it is set up as a 'window class', right? Then again Windows programming terminology does tend to make no sense, both 'device' and 'window class' don't mean what you think they would.

[Zevensoft]

hDC's are handles to bitmaps (basically).

[Magic.X]

... where objects are to be drawn on the screen.

IMHO Fullscreen Overlay draws directly to the overlay and avoids using a hdc. Maybe i'm just wrong but this seems logical to me.

[jheriko]

Originally posted by Zevensoft
hDC's are handles to bitmaps (basically).

You use Visual Basic too much.

[Magic.X]

To demystify the hDC:

A device context is a structure that defines a set of graphic objects and their associated attributes, and the graphic modes that affect output. The graphic objects include a pen for line drawing, a brush for painting and filling, a bitmap for copying or scrolling parts of the screen, a palette for defining the set of available colors, a region for clipping and other operations, and a path for painting and drawing operations.

[dirkdeftly]

lmao. i ask what fullscreen overlay does and i've already gotten 3 entirely different explanations of it (one from nic on #ff). what i can tell you is my comp is doing something entirely different to anything you guys have told me

[Magic.X]

In this case, my dear Atero, why the heck don't you tell us what your comp DOES?

[Deamon]

because he likes it when we ask him for it.

[jheriko]

Actually the description I gave and the description by Zevensoft are of the same thing... he just knows more about its guts than I do. Its also probably the correct description because there really isn't any other way to use the hardware overlay for fullscreen.

[dirkdeftly]

well, what my comp is doing is going fullscreen with neither the current windowed screensize or the selected fullscreen screensize OR the current Windows screensize, and it has a hexagonal mesh of dots on it. which makes absolutely no sense to me. hence this post.

[Magic.X]

Duh! This is weird. Maybe this is caused by some hardware reasons? As this function is based on video card acceleration, maybe your vc has problems displaying it correctly.

Does normal Overlay and Video Fullscreen work?