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Thread: Screensaver with transparent background ... possible?

  1. #1
    Junior Member
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    Screensaver with transparent background ... possible?

    hey,

    i am trying to create a flash based screensaver that actually has a transparent background. that means if the screensaver activates you will still see your desktop. of course there will still be some other action ... but the main point is that the screensaver has to have a transparency.

    my problem is that i know how to set the background transparent whem publishing. but i want ot use the .exe or .swf to create my .scr file so wmode wouldnt help here.

    does anyone know how i can set the background transparency in the .swf or projector file so my later created .scr would be transparent???

    thx for any help

  2. #2
    Lifetime Friend of Site Staff Northcode's Avatar
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    On windows NT, 2000, XP, etc (the "NT" based versions of Windows) screensavers run on separate desktops not the current user desktop. So once the screensaver kicks in it runs on a blank desktop (no icons, no taskbar, nothing). Making one of these puppies transparent is pointless because you won't see anything behind them.

    IF you had a helper application running on the user desktop that could take a snapshot AND send it to the screensaver AND the screensaver could load that image then you wouldn't need to be transparent, but you would get the same effect.

    You won't likely meet all those conditions without help from a third party swf2scr application and mine (SWF Studio) is the only one I know of that already has a helper application (that the SCR can talk to) already in place that could be perverted (in a good way) into doing what you need.

  3. #3
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    Thanks for your help. It led me to another software, probably a competitor of northcode ;-)

    MDM Zinc. I tried both trial version, zinc and swf studio. I experienced that zinc worked as I expected, didnt get my project to work with swf studio. but thats probably because I did only check it out for 45 minutes.

  4. #4
    Lifetime Friend of Site Staff Northcode's Avatar
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    Just saw your post in the MDM forums. Both Zinc and SWF Studio can capture the desktop contents but NOT once the screensaver has been started by Windows. You may THINK it's working while you are running the screensaver in test mode, but the security does not apply then.

    You need a helper application to do this properly in all situations and the helper can't be launched by the screensaver, it has to be running in advance. You should also know that any kind of helper application like this should be considered a security hole and may not work in Vista because of new IPC (inter-process communication) security restrictions.

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