[mjg59]

There's nothing stopping hardware accelerated decode being in the same framebuffer as everything else, the only reason for this is DRM - you get just the same acceleration with VLC, but can still screenshot.

The XP era is when we depended on fixed-function hardware overlays to scale video and handle yuv translation, and yes in that case you'd just get a magenta or blue background instead of the video. That era sucked, and hardware got better since then.

[ack_complete]

Those never went away, they're just called multiplane overlay (MPO) now and are better integrated into the system. The Windows 10/11 DWM automatically migrates swap chains in and out of independently flipped overlays to save power, and can recomposite them when screen capture is requested.