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- Hacker News
- Amazing, can’t wait to try this out!
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.
by ellisd - I suspect the retail stores are using autonomous single app mode, which allows an app deployed on an MDM managed device to take control and force itself to the foreground, disabling screen sleep and other things. I briefly did some reading around it recently when wondering about putting some sort of dashboard on my TV while idle.by jon-wood
- 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!by kageroumado
- frieren spotted!
also, nice typography.
by sixeyes - How did you bring up the page so quick? And what helped you design it?by ggrelet
- 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!by wanoir
- Thank you! I’m glad you like itby kageroumado
- 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!”.
by fps-hero - So in summary… it’s fun when you do it but “weird” when others do the same.
This is life. We discover things for ourselves, on our own time.
by jbs789 - Reminds me how windows 98 allowed using a HTML page as background. Said HTML could include videos.by arkh
- 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.
by somat - Oh wow, that's seriously awesome. I did manage to reverse engineer the private screensaver `.appex` framework and make it work for Aerial 4 (I released a sample project/documentation last week here alongside v4 for those who want : https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/AppexSaverMinimal).
I also tried the same with Wallpaper appexes, the reversing seemed easy enough, but WallpaperAgent refused to load them, so I still use the classic trick of using my own window with a video player on top of the wallpaper, and below the icons.
I will have a look and check what I missed.
by cwizou - 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.
Here's a thread I just found now that shows others having similar issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ii38g8/macbook_wall...
by markdown - 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.by kageroumado
- Apple's best video wallpaper is "Macintosh". I am interested in how it works.by musicale
- 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.by futhey
- 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.by tharropoulos
- Thank you! The way it works is that the video playback is shared between the lock screen and the desktop, and Apple’s framework transparently switches the surface it’s displayed to.by kageroumado
- 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!by postalcoder
- OMG, LegacyScreenSaver is such a memory hog!by mikestaas
- As far as I can tell this is for WallpaperAgent, an extension to `com.apple.wallpaper` that are ran by WallpaperAgent on the desktop. For screensavers check my other post, I posted a sample the private screensaver api to bypass that.
Apple's uses both for their own "Aerials" and they have a sync system to share the position between the screensaver player and the desktop player.
by cwizou - 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!by buildbot
- 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.by wpm
- I'm feeling nostalgic for ~1998 when I ran xscreensaver hacks in the background on the root X window (so the "desktop" I guess)by philsnow
- https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Windows_Vista
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
by asimovDev - I’m imagining dozens of people worldwide sharing your nostalgia for Vista.by riddlemethat
- 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.by jermaustin1
- What do you mean Windows Vista "nostalgia"? That makes me feel a little long in the horn.by _kb
- 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!by encore2097