I find it weird today that we are still fascinated by video wall papers.
This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.
Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.
I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.
But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?
They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.
Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!
Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.
I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.
Very neat. I was confused at first, I was like you can download the video screensavers.. why scrape the frames. Then I saw your comment and read I can use my own videos for desktop and lock screen. Great work! Dont bury the lede! A title with the hook of what and how would be super helpful!
As much (fairly well deserved) hate as Tahoe gets, the video wallpapers and transparency are such a fun Windows Vista vibe I get nostalgia. Time to set this up with the Vista waterfall wallpaper and reallllyyy feel like it’s 2007!
My big problem with Tahoe, is the lock screen animation stutters and freezes CONSTANTLY. I'm on an M3 Pro. If I can watch 4K video with no dropped frames, a simple video background should work as well, and if it doesn't, it shouldn't exist.
Being unable to know the current date or being unable to subtract two simple numbers is not funny. Encouraging such behavior will waste people's time having to deal with people on this site who can't do simple arithmetic. There are other websites where such cheap "humor" is more acceptable.
> Encouraging such behavior will waste people's time having to deal with people on this site who can't do simple arithmetic.
We shouldn't encourage people who can't properly read and understand a comment before replying either, but here we are talking to you who jumped on correcting the “2 or 3 years” to “19 years” without noticing that “2007” was in the post so the poster was obviously well aware of that.
> being unable to subtract two simple numbers is not funny
1. That is not the joke. It is referencing how humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates to the actual reality, especially as we age.
2. Humour is subjective. So is, to an extent, the amount of it that is acceptable in a given environment. Sense of humour is sometimes objectively non-existent, as you helpfully illustrate by clear example.
which waterfall are you talking about? i am also surprised to see how many wallpapers were apparently available on Vista. All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and I think I had the bamboo forest on at some point
> All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and…
IIRC at that time users were split fairly completely into three types: those who customised their OS look a lot, sometimes spending far too much time on it (I was one of them back then), those who had developed a preferred look and just kept that as much as possible between OS changes, and those who just used the defaults and got on with whatever else. This means the other wallpaper that someone at MS put effort into collecting together hardly ever got seen: many users kept the one default, and almost all who didn't had something that they chose from other sources. Maybe the other included images might have seen the light of day more often if there had been an explicit “choose your wallpaper” prompt as part of user on-boarding.
The moving wallpapers are near the first few times but I can't turn it off. I had to dig deep into WallpaperKit (I mean really? It's a friggin wallpaper) to find the static last frame of the wooshy moving BS.
Wow, thank you for this. I've been working on a screensaver suite but LegacyScreenSaver is so janky. I was hoping someone would figure out apple's private wallpaper framework and you did!
Same! I distinctly remember seeing portions of this wallpaper that led me to believe it's procedurally generated and not simply a collection of video files, and had to rewatch it to confirm. There are several points where the date and time match the system date and time down to the second.
Really nice work. We went down a similar rabbit hole recently and reverse engineered the Aerials catalogue to figure out how Apple wires this stuff up, so seeing another open source project doing this is great. The detail I love most and one I can't replicate on our own tool is how the animation persists between the login window and the live desktop. We built phonto as a cross platform take on the same idea, https://github.com/museslabs/phonto. I was about to start writing an article on the whole reverse engineering process and this might be the nudge I needed to start working on it.
And then there is X11, whatever program you want can be set to the root window.
Anyhow, on topic, that windows 98 active desktop was the most unstable part of an already shaky OS. First thing to turn off when installing a new system. I mean, it would still crash if you looked at it wrong. But at least it was not dying for the fun of it anymore.
On a similar note, I’d love to replace Aerials on tvOS with my own videos. I have yet to figure out how to craft a working data feed that the tvOS will accept using the secret mode that I believe is used in the retail store displays.
Out of curiosity: how much did you need to steer Claude while working on this project, and how long did it have?
Asking partly because I see "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>", and partly because I keep hearing "so what do you do with all these agents", and this is a good example of what people do with all these agents.
So cool!
This reminds me I wanted to try setting a custom video background with some footage i had.
Didn’t even realize it wasn’t natively supported till i saw this!
The app now has a landing page with a download link and you can also see my other projects: the largest one is Refrax browser, but I also have many other small utility apps!
I won't use it, myself, because I can't deal with wallpaper moving behind my work (I also can't listen to music, while I work. Maybe it's a "generational" thing). Also, I use a 49-inch ultrawide, so it might be vomit-inducing.
I remember some other utility that played wallpaper videos, but it wasn't anywhere near as nicely done.
These damned wallpapers gave me my worst experience with Apple. MacOS would delete them and redownload automatically over and over again, using almost a terrabyte of data per week.
And I wasn't even using video wallpapers at the time.
Just discovered I had no internet 3 days into the month as my ISP had cut me off. Had to dig deep and spend hours I'll never get back trying to find out where all the data was going.
This app injects itself directly into Apple’s actual pipeline, so your videos won’t get removed or changed. It’s not just an automated replacer of Apple’s own videos.
You could set a full-screen, interactive browser page as the backdrop of your desktop. Not sure what communication it was allowed to have with the desktop events, but I always thought it was a clever hack that could have been explored and expanded further.
i remember setting a html with a flash file and it did track the cursor accurately for some fun effects. couldn't keep it like that due to resource use but yeah, it was fun!
icons and text would get single-color backdrops though. no transparency back to the html
The video will keep playing on the lock screen, but screen savers are a different thing. You can have the same video as your wallpaper and screen saver though.
I wonder about this when I see someone post their own work without the Show HN prefix - is it always supposed to be a Show? (Enforcement/community objection to the lack thereof doesn't seem to be very strenuous, if so. Or, maybe it gets fixed after a little while and I haven't noticed.)
This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.
Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.
I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.
But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?
They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.
Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!
Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.
I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.
This is life. We discover things for ourselves, on our own time.
I see what you did there :)
We shouldn't encourage people who can't properly read and understand a comment before replying either, but here we are talking to you who jumped on correcting the “2 or 3 years” to “19 years” without noticing that “2007” was in the post so the poster was obviously well aware of that.
> being unable to subtract two simple numbers is not funny
1. That is not the joke. It is referencing how humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates to the actual reality, especially as we age.
2. Humour is subjective. So is, to an extent, the amount of it that is acceptable in a given environment. Sense of humour is sometimes objectively non-existent, as you helpfully illustrate by clear example.
which waterfall are you talking about? i am also surprised to see how many wallpapers were apparently available on Vista. All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and I think I had the bamboo forest on at some point
IIRC at that time users were split fairly completely into three types: those who customised their OS look a lot, sometimes spending far too much time on it (I was one of them back then), those who had developed a preferred look and just kept that as much as possible between OS changes, and those who just used the defaults and got on with whatever else. This means the other wallpaper that someone at MS put effort into collecting together hardly ever got seen: many users kept the one default, and almost all who didn't had something that they chose from other sources. Maybe the other included images might have seen the light of day more often if there had been an explicit “choose your wallpaper” prompt as part of user on-boarding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45247396
/System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/WallpaperMacintoshExtension.appex
Can see the time and date being added here I think:
System6ControlPanel.program
Anyhow, on topic, that windows 98 active desktop was the most unstable part of an already shaky OS. First thing to turn off when installing a new system. I mean, it would still crash if you looked at it wrong. But at least it was not dying for the fun of it anymore.
On a similar note, I’d love to replace Aerials on tvOS with my own videos. I have yet to figure out how to craft a working data feed that the tvOS will accept using the secret mode that I believe is used in the retail store displays.
Out of curiosity: how much did you need to steer Claude while working on this project, and how long did it have?
Asking partly because I see "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>", and partly because I keep hearing "so what do you do with all these agents", and this is a good example of what people do with all these agents.
https://kagerou.glass/phosphene/
https://kagerou.glass
also, nice typography.
However, it may definitely get broken by Apple, as you note.
I won't use it, myself, because I can't deal with wallpaper moving behind my work (I also can't listen to music, while I work. Maybe it's a "generational" thing). Also, I use a 49-inch ultrawide, so it might be vomit-inducing.
I remember some other utility that played wallpaper videos, but it wasn't anywhere near as nicely done.
And I wasn't even using video wallpapers at the time.
Just discovered I had no internet 3 days into the month as my ISP had cut me off. Had to dig deep and spend hours I'll never get back trying to find out where all the data was going.
Here's a thread I just found now that shows others having similar issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ii38g8/macbook_wall...
icons and text would get single-color backdrops though. no transparency back to the html