Simulated Video on the Top Half of the Screen
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 12:31 am
I have been carrying out an interesting experiment in the last few days that has enabled me to make the Prevue program "look" like it is producing video on the top half of the screen. I thought I would share this and see what everyone thought...
While we may be manipulating the software itself, I have been looking for external means of making the emulated Prevue channel appear more realistic, whether playing from my desktop's 2nd monitor or to my TV from my laptop. First thing is that I have managed to use the "filters" settings in WinUAE to scale the Prevue screen perfectly onto my TV, so that when it plays onto my TV, no gaps show on the edges. Next thing I did was take all of the Prevue music kept on youtube and download it to my hard disk, putting it in Winamp on shuffle. This is when i had the idea that maybe I can put a video window over the top half of the screen, with the video appearing when shuffle reached a video, or the video disappears and it reverts back to the ads, etc on the ADF when it is just the music playing. While I got this to work, there was no way to get rid of the bottom border to winamp's video window. So I did a search and found a media player called KMPlayer, which allowed me to not only to do what winamp does, but it allowed for a "borderless" window, if configured right. As it stands, KMPlayer is playing Prevue Channel bumpers from Youtube (cropped from their original videos using VirtualDUB) covering the top half of my emulator. I'd also like to add that both the left and right sides are to scale on all edges (its not "crunched" like what Windows Movie Maker is notorious for in their 16:9 resolutions). With that being said, one could make any clip from the top half of any Prevue video on Youtube appear as if it is coming from the emulated Prevue Guide/Channel. All you need is either a second monitor or a TV for it to play on from the computer (so far, it only works when the second screen is at 640x480).
Let me know what you think, or if I should upload some video of this in action.
While we may be manipulating the software itself, I have been looking for external means of making the emulated Prevue channel appear more realistic, whether playing from my desktop's 2nd monitor or to my TV from my laptop. First thing is that I have managed to use the "filters" settings in WinUAE to scale the Prevue screen perfectly onto my TV, so that when it plays onto my TV, no gaps show on the edges. Next thing I did was take all of the Prevue music kept on youtube and download it to my hard disk, putting it in Winamp on shuffle. This is when i had the idea that maybe I can put a video window over the top half of the screen, with the video appearing when shuffle reached a video, or the video disappears and it reverts back to the ads, etc on the ADF when it is just the music playing. While I got this to work, there was no way to get rid of the bottom border to winamp's video window. So I did a search and found a media player called KMPlayer, which allowed me to not only to do what winamp does, but it allowed for a "borderless" window, if configured right. As it stands, KMPlayer is playing Prevue Channel bumpers from Youtube (cropped from their original videos using VirtualDUB) covering the top half of my emulator. I'd also like to add that both the left and right sides are to scale on all edges (its not "crunched" like what Windows Movie Maker is notorious for in their 16:9 resolutions). With that being said, one could make any clip from the top half of any Prevue video on Youtube appear as if it is coming from the emulated Prevue Guide/Channel. All you need is either a second monitor or a TV for it to play on from the computer (so far, it only works when the second screen is at 640x480).
Let me know what you think, or if I should upload some video of this in action.