Windows video players used to just be green screens, which is why you could trick MS Paint into becoming a little theater
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Video playback on old computers was a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

If you opened up the ol’ Windows Media player back in the 95, 98 or XP days, brace yourself for a mild shock: it was lying to you.

And by lying, well, what I really mean is rendering video somewhere other than inside the actual window that was open on your desktop—sort of a parallel plane of existence to the desktop you were actually looking at—before sneakily porting it over