2020-07-28-Computer-display-weirdness

Computer display weirdness

Since the lockdown has, well, *locked down* most of the career center's normal functioning -- we can't do events or seminars, we have to stay further from patrons while we help them with their resumes, etc. -- we've started recording some videos on common topics for our new YouTube channel. My colleagues have done video versions of their commonly-given seminars and the others of us have been working on walkthroughs for online applications for common employers.

For the applications, we've been using OBS, except for that OBS doesn't record drop-downs. So we've been using Zoom instead, making a meeting with ourselves, and recording that meeting. It doesn't make sense but it (mostly) works.

Of course, I forgot about the drop-down problem and used OBS the other day for my video ... and the drop-downs didn't record. The problem forced me to think about *why* that might be the case, and the best I could figure is that, on Windows, drop-downs are rendered as extra windows. This thread in the OBS forum kind of confirms my theory:

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/window-capture-issue-to-record-drop-down-menus.67428/

I know for a fact that's how it works (menus as windows) on Linux / X Windows. There's a window tree, actually, so like, the browser will be the parent window and then will ask X to render a child window with the menu contents (I think there's even a menu *type*, which things like compositors use to decide whether to make menus transparent or not, etc.). I'm not sure how Windows does it -- either there's no window tree so OBS has no way to tell what windows are children of what, so it can't also grab child windows, OR OBS is dumb and doesn't grab child windows with the parent. Who knows -- you'd have to look at the source for that.

Now an even weirder thing that I discovered later was this: some of the drop- downs in the application I was working on aren't stock elements, so they're not rendered by the browser -- they're custom elements (I'm assuming) rendered by Javascript in the page. Stock elements are rendered by the browser, so it farms out to the display asking for a new window, which doesn't show up in OBS. HOWEVER, the ~fancy~ dropdowns are rendered in the webpage, meaning they're a part of the content, and rendered *with* the browser -- so they *do* show up in the resulting video.

Weirdness abounds, it seems.

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