I want to make a movie file with a transparent background. Please help.

[One Shot Guest]

I want to make a movie file with a transparent background.

The avi format supports it, and has for years now. I believe most other formats do as well.

Are there any free programs out there that can either take an existing .avi file, and remove the background color so its totally see through, or make a new file like that using .png or .tga files that have transparent backgrounds already?

I've been searching for awhile now, and trying out many differant things. Please help.

[sysKin]

I want to make a movie file with a transparent background.

The avi format supports it, and has for years now. I believe most other formats do as well.
It's not really a matter of avi supporting it or not (yes it doesn't prevent you from using rgb32 with alpha) but you still need to find a *codec* that supports it.
I'm unaware of such codec.

[Mug Funky]

doesn't corepng support it?

but then a bigger problem is editing/post programs that simply ignore the alpha channel even if the codec delivers it...

btw, i assume you're talking about chroma-key here, yeah?

[One Shot Guest]

http://corecodec.org/projects/corepng/
I downloaded this, but its just the source code, and it doesn't compile for me with Visual C++ .net 2003 standard. Does anyone have a binary I can download from somewhere?

Yes. Chromakey, or alpha channel, or whatever else is out there. Anything that works.

Is there a .dll perhaps I could link to which will throw just the .avi to the screen, minus its background color?

[foxyshadis]

That has the vfw codec included too! So you could use VFW interfaces to encode, decode, or otherwise display an avi (and since you have the vfw it should work with directshow too). I don't know about other integrations though.

[Zarxrax]

Huffyuv and Lagarith Both support an alpha channel.
Avisynth can key out a background color (I think)

[One Shot Guest]

Thanks everyone.

Found some C++ code that looks promising. Got to track down all the dependacies, and try to get it to compile though. There are always errors telling me I need to find certain header files and whatnot that I don't have... *grumble grumble*