I’m writing this purely because I just spent half an hour trawling through the internet (and several Flex reference books) looking to see if there was a way to get the Flex VideoDisplay component to display my video with its alpha channel; and be transparent. The answer, of course and the reason why there wasn’t a hundred angry rants on the subject is because the VideoDisplay component has a background colour set by default to black. You’ll need to set the background-alpha to zero to see what’s underneath.

Interestingly though, while messing about trying to get this to work I set the opaqueBackground property to false and while this was the case it didn’t allow the background-alpha property to have any affect … this might be a bug. You don’t need this property anyway. Plain and simple alpha on the background was all I needed.

Sometimes these small things can throw you for hours … all you Flex developers out there … let’s blog about the really stupid, obvious mistakes we make as well!