Fair Trade machinima

Fair Trade: that decent organisation that means some coffee growers get paid properly for their wares, while some companies, like Fourbucks, can claim to offer Fair Trade coffee when in fact they offer it on their drip machine and not for any big drink you have made at the espresso machine. Watch out for that.

Strange Company have been producing some machinima recently to illustrate the plight of the farmer, using both The Sims and World of Warcraft as engines:

The Sims 2 Fair Trade ad was made as a collaboration between Machinima producers Strange Company, ethical marketing group Hand Up Media, and a creative group from Rosehall High School near Glasgow, who came up with the concept, the storyboard, and acted in the film.

The World of Warcraft Fair Trade ad was made entirely by Strange Company, after we became enthusiastic about the idea.

Not only are these little movies on a good topic, they involved kids from local schools, and the movies are deeply Creative Commons'd. Windows Media Player won't let me take a screenshot of this via usual sources (Print Screen, FastStone Capture), the DRM in it means I get a black jpg. God I hate Windows Media Player. Can't even screenshot from VLC.. have they snuck this anti-screenshot stuff into XP now??

ANYWAY. Sod downloading the stupid .wmv file, you can see them right here.

Comments

[Hugh "Nomad" Hancock]

Thanks very much for the plug!

You should be able to take screenshots using VLC and the DivX version - VLC and WMV don't always play nicely, but DivX tends to work OK.

[Peeple]

I'm not quite technical enough to tell you what the exact terminology for it is, but basically it's your video driver beaming the video you're trying to capture directly to your monitor, rather than going through the OS (where it could be print screened). For a fun demonstration, have your "blank" screenshot open in an imaging program, with the video being played in an open video player behind the blank portion of the screenshot. You should be able to see through your imaging program. I hope that makes sense. In any event, it has nothing to do with DRM. I believe, and don't quote me on this, that turning your hardware acceleration down will alleviate the problem.

[Alice]

Peeple.. really? It's not DRM? It sure works like DRM - i.e., stops me doing what I want to do - but what you describe is pretty much what I'm getting.

Oddly though, in my experience previously, it happens with some media players (e.g. WMP) and not others, which suggests to me that it's built into the player.

I'd love to know the answer to this.

[ILL Robinson]

Alice, if you want screengrabbies from WMP, turn down the "Video Acceleration" a notch or two under Options/Performance (tab). Then PRNTSCRN til your heart's content.

Great work by SC (again).

[Seb Potter]

Specifically it's the way that video hardware and does overlaying to render video. The video is sent directly to the graphics card memory without being written as a series of bitmaps into the Windows graphics subsystem. This makes processing video very fast, but means that screenshot systems that rely on Windows GDI to render out a portion of screen only know about a blank masking image.

Using hardware overlays is dependent upon your player app. In VLC you can turn it off entirely (Settings > Preferences > Video > Overlay Video Output) which makes for worse video playback, but allows you to take screenies.

To sort in in WMP, it's in Options > Performance > Advanced. You don't need to turn down hardware acceleration.

[ILL Robinson]

Good points, Seb. Though turning down the hardware accel is essentially telling Windows to bypass the overlay?