ScreenPlay Is an Open Source Live-Wallpaper App for Windows and OS X | Hacker News Reader

ScreenPlay Is an Open Source Live-Wallpaper App for Windows and OS X

screen-play.app

63 pointsdoener48 comments

Oh hi HN, creator of ScreenPlay here :) I'm currently working on adding wallpaper timeline support, that lets you set wallpaper based on start and end time. Also, I have been working Godot 4.3 wallpaper support. I hope I will find the time and release the 1.0 update this year!

I stumbled upon your website because of your BlueSky follow. ;)

Looks really interesting! Video wallpapers were actually a feature in Windows past [0]. I remember some feature in XP which let you show an HTML page as a wallpaper too which I enjoyed playing with, so I'll definitely give this a go

Just a heads up, a handful of your Read More links on the homepage are broken

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DreamScene?useskin=vec...

> I remember some feature in XP which let you show an HTML page as a wallpaper too

Active Desktop was originally introduced for Windows 95: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

I remember in KDE (3? 3.5?) you could embed HTML as your wallpaper. That was interesting.

That feature goes back way longer.

Internet Explorer 4 (Windows) with Active Desktop was the first time I’ve encountered HTML as a wallpaper. The performance was terrible on most computers of that time but you have to bear in mind we were talking about a few hundred megs of RAM being “high end”.

Interesting, I wasn't trying to claim KDE's was older, just making an aside, that I thought it was interesting, I forgot Windows did the same too.

I still remember during the XP era where I thought 40GB was revolutionary after suffering a Millenium Me 500MB hdd computer...

It’s funny how it doesn’t matter how much resources you have, there’s always a way to fill it.

I don’t remember if Mac had HTML but I used to set one of the quartz screensavers as my desktop back in the day. I can’t find links to how to do it right now so can’t test if it still works. It could only be set using a command line so it wasn’t exactly mainstream. I found “Flurry” to have decently low battery and CPU usage but many would chew through one or the other quickly.

Nice project, I'm keeping an eye on this! Could you comment about its resource/power consumption? It's especially helpful to know for laptop users.

Small thing - the homepage has a link to https://kelteseth.gitlab.io/ScreenPlayDocs/Wallpaper/ but that just 404's.

Hey there - As a suggestion, cause it took me like 10mins now to find it, the alternative downloads link... Shouldn't it point to "https://gitlab.com/kelteseth/ScreenPlay/-/releases" instead of your pipelines? That path requires a gitlab account, and I still couldn't find the download link even after registering.

Also, the latest release is nearly a year old. Is this correct? There have been quite a few commits since then. However, the pipeline seems to be broken and no longer(?) produces binaries.

FYI: Under the Features section of the homepage, the first two "Read More..." links are broken (Wallpapers and Widgets)

Since you are using the Steam platform, I think there is a lot of potential for game devs, or users of games, to create themed live wallpaper.

Sort of a related question: How many of you actually see your desktop on a daily basis? I feel like even with 3 monitors I have either tiled windows, or full-screen windows taking up the entire desktop. I oftentimes even forget what my wallpaper is.

Yeah same. Never see it. It kills me whenever I see people plastering their desktop with icons and stuff. I mean do you keep all your important stuff under a pile of papers on your physical desk?

>I mean do you keep all your important stuff under a pile of papers on your physical desk?

No, it's under a bottle of antacid.

I do

I keep any projects/files I'm working on visible on my desk then tidy up as needed (I also have script to move files to a location based on extension, but it doesn't get executed until I checked anything that might cause problems being moved)

As someone with ADHD I keep things closed unless I am actively using them. I see my wallpaper quite often, especially on the second monitor (I do use the second monitor for things like development, but only if it doesn’t distract.)

Work? Daily, at startup.

Home? Hourly, at task switch.

a recent windows update changed my black background to random pictures (changes on login). now I have to activate windows to be able to change it back, because now I "see" it all the time

What's the battery life hit going to look like, running live wallpaper and widgets on an Apple silicon MacBook Pro?

This makes me curious, on Mac right now you can set one of their video screensaver things as your background. When you unlock this will slow down the video gracefully to a single frame, but will be playing briefly as your desktop background.

So does Mac already technically have a native way to play a video as your background, it just does not give the option? I am curious if anyone has looked at what the performance hit during those few seconds of video playing when unlocking. (Also curious how this works on the backend, is the video just "paused" or is it taking a frame and setting that as the background for better performance).

Is this using the built in method for this just removing the part where it slows down?

> So does Mac already technically have a native way to play a video as your background, it just does not give the option?

Not really. It may have changed in Sequoia, but afaik in Sonoma this is how it worked :

- ScreenSaver plays the video

- You press a key/unlock your mac

- ScreenSaver does a XPC to the new Wallpaper system with the exact timing/position of where the screensaver was

- Wallpaper system starts a new video player and syncs it exactly

- Your mac wakes up, screensaver is hidden (it's complicated), and the second video player starts playing and slows down

- Eventually it gets replaced by a static screenshot of the last played frame seamlessly

- Screensaver exits (maybe, sometimes)

It's fairly complicated.

> what the performance hit during those few seconds of video playing when unlocking

Minimal, it's all hardware accelerated (videos are 4K/h265).

> is the video just "paused" or is it taking a frame and setting that as the background for better performance

It takes the last decoded frame eventually, but it's not instantaneous.

There are tons of other interesting tidbits about the system, I tried to untangle it because Apple introduced some really annoying bugs in the screensaver system as they changed the way screensavers exits because of the XPC handshake, and it threw a lot of issues in Aerial and other 3rd party screensavers.

Also if you use Spaces or multiple monitors, because you were able to have a different wallpaper on different Spaces/monitors, Apple now lets you set a different screensaver on each. That broke the ability to set a default screensaver which is a pain for 3rd parties.

Note that the "screensaver/wallpapers" videos are 4K/240FPS (likely interpolated frames for many) just to get that smooth slowdown effect. And they backported pretty much the entire catalog of existing Aerials to that format, even if only a few are available in macOS.

I do use these (the whole collection) in Aerial and for a few years I've also had a desktop version if you want to give it a try, it's in the installer. By default I use the 240FPS videos nowadays, and the desktop tool (Aerial Companion) will play those back at slow speed too by default (there are playback controls) : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io

That does seem like a lot of steps to make it work, but at least the screenshot part makes sense from a performance stand point.

However one part that confuses me:

> Your mac wakes up, screensaver is hidden (it's complicated), and the second video player starts playing and slows down.

I would think that it technically means that Mac does have the capability of playing a video in the background. Maybe right now it is hard coded to slow down and eventually be replaced, but something is still playing and moving in the background.

I did not realize until you mentioned it that you could have different screensavers on different screens. I guess logically it makes sense given that you can have different wallpaper, but I am kinda surprised they took it that far.

I thought all of the videos are available on Mac. I can't think of any that I have seen on my Apple TV that I am not currently seeing as part of this. I am looking in system preferences and I see 61 landscape, 30 cityscape, 21 underwater, and 22 earth

> I would think that it technically means that Mac does have the capability of playing a video in the background.

I mean, under the hood, it's just windows that are stacked on top of each other at different Z-index.

The wallpaper itself is a window, it sits at the lowest z-index. There's another (transparent) window a few levels above, where your icons sit. Dock/menubar sit on top of those again a few levels above. You can yourself put a window there at pretty much any level.

The screen saver is its own window that's put "on top" of everything else. The XPC I mention starts the player in the desktop window below. Makes sense ?

> I did not realize until you mentioned it that you could have different screensavers on different screens. I guess logically it makes sense given that you can have different wallpaper, but I am kinda surprised they took it that far.

They had too with the way they implemented it, for each screen if you want the "continuity" effect you have to be able to set a different one as both saver/wallpaper.

> I thought all of the videos are available on Mac. I can't think of any that I have seen on my Apple TV that I am not currently seeing as part of this. I am looking in system preferences and I see 61 landscape, 30 cityscape, 21 underwater, and 22 earth

Are you running Sequoia ? I double checked and it now looks like they use the full collection indeed. I'm fairly sure it wasn't the case in Sonoma at the beginning. Maybe they added them in a point update at some point and I missed them. They always had the full manifest of videos, but only a subset was available when they launched the feature, that I'm sure. Some are fairly old and not very sharp, so it made sense to be selective, but Apple does create new versions of the same videos to clean them up fairly frequently.

Behind the scene there's a SQLite database that used to contain only which ones were shown in the UI, while the manifest of videos (which is similar to, but not the one used on tvOS, which has HDR versions encoded with Dolby Vision) is pulled online periodically.

Will try this out later. Always looking for an easy way to load new wallpapers once I get tired of the old one. Especially love the low-motion 'cinemagraph' style ones.

My setup is a nightmare though. One 2xHD ultrawide. One Vertical 1080p monitor. One 4k Projector.

So when they're all turned on I see my wallpaper fairly often and it just has to be a fairly flexible, high res image to fit all of those permutations.

If ScreenPlay can handle that setup with even only a small portion of its database of wallpapers then it'll hold value to me. I know others won't have my exact setup, but I think non-standard screen setups are more common than people assume.

Windows user here, exited to try this, but on the download page [1] the link to download the installer didn't work as expected to me. I don't see an exe/msi file to download here [2].

Any solution?

[1] https://screen-play.app/download/

[2] https://gitlab.com/kelteseth/ScreenPlay/-/pipelines

Do these things use a lot of resources? Is the build process less painful than using Epic Games?

I use https://github.com/rocksdanister/lively BTW. pretty good and low on resources too

Can someone comment on what is the CPU/GPU usage while this is running? Does it also take up resources when the desktop is in the background or when another window is maximized?

Is there a Spotify integration widget, and/or audio visualizer? Rainmeter has it, but it's a bit tricky to get to work, and may mess up sleep/hibernation modes.

I have been working on that (tm). I got the audio visualizer prototype working on Windows. And the Spotify integration should be easy. IIRC rainmeter also just checks for the current Spotify Window title to get the song name.

What are the odds of something like this eventually supporting android? My android TV is where I most want a wallpaper like this.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to install live-wallpapers using this app. I hope I'm not the only one..

Hopefully the Linux/KDE support turns out to work well (preferably on at least Debian) when it comes out. :)

This has been possible for a long time. We just don't do it because it is stupid. See -rootwin option from the mplayer man page.

You're saying it does work on Linux, unlike what the repo documentation says?

Ahhh, my misunderstanding. You're saying playing video's (eg from mplayer) as a background is the already-existing equivalent?

This concept has suddenly become interesting again now that I have a bunch of OLED devices.

Is there shader / GPGPU / CPU coding available :) ?

Is there anything like this that works on Linux (x11) ?

Yes, there is an X and Wayland wlroots (so no Gnome support ) implementation, but I have not managed to find the time to test and deploy it properly.

Doesn’t VLC do live wallpapers? I’m pretty sure I tried something like this over a decade ago.

mplayer has been doing this for a loooooong time with the -rootwin option. You quickly grow tired of this though.

For Gnome there's the Hanabi extension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWjXl4h9_BA

X11 & Wayland, but KDE only: https://github.com/catsout/wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin

Wayland Only: https://github.com/GhostNaN/mpvpaper

X11 Only: https://github.com/jtsiomb/xlivebg

How does this compare to Wallpaper Engine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com