Animating the Wallpaper

Let's reach 2000 likes 💜 Wallpapers are usually static. Did you know Windows used to support animated wallpapers? And did you know that with enough trickery, you can still use them today? We will dig into the historical precedent, then try to put together some homemade variants, after which we will use an open-source solution.
Restless Wallpaper V1: flies.sh/rwv1
Restless Wallpaper V2: flies.sh/rwv2
Lively Wallpaper: github.com/rocksdanister/live...
0:00 - Intro
0:25 - #1 - Windows DreamScene
1:39 - #2 - Windows DreamScene, but in Windows 7
2:51 - #3 - Windows DreamScene, but in Windows 11
3:03 - #4 - The VLC background
4:26 - #5 - The Wallpaper Cycler
6:24 - #6 - Hide behind the wall
7:54 - #7 - A lively wallpaper
8:52 - Outro
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#wallpaper #homemade #flytech #animatedwallpaper

[@FlyTechVideos]

Join the channel's discord server "The Flying Tech" - flies.sh/discord

[@coolchannelyt]

yup

[@Airakaz0001]

Ok

[@Airakaz0001]

Ok

[@batorerdyniev9805]

No

[@Smiling_Guest]

Yes

[@windestruct]

Back to the Windows 98 days when you could set a gif as a wallpaper with no problems

[@benjaluth07]

Yeah😢

[@jedsiecz]

and html files because internet explorer as wallpaper

[@windestruct]

@@jedsiecz That too.

[@steve_1507]

That was really cool

[@steve_1507]

I don't get why they removed it. Maybe restrict it to local HTML sites for security

[@Foxy_AR]

1:36 the most stable that vista has ever been

[@granitium]

0:28 poor little recycling bin 😪

[@ivancomp_inside]

Большая Корзинуля

[@granitium]

@@ivancomp_inside ладно.

[@OfficialBA2024]

When the world needed him,he came back!

[@lleonix]

The desktop being not full in your RentlessWalpaper2 program is cause of the WindowState.Maximize property, which doesn't account for the non-borderly window. You should instead use a normal window with the dimensions the same as the screen. btw love your work i didn't know that this existed in the first place and I think it should be more popular.

[@StiekemeHenk]

My brother once trolled me back in 2012? Windows 7, Rick roll wallpaper. It even played the audio and I have no clue how he did it. I did a full C: drive search for "rick" and deleted a ton of files to remove it.

[@notlunar11xd]

Did you delete system32 too?

[@waduruwaddi]

its an joke virus

[@StiekemeHenk]

@@waduruwaddi i am aware.

[@Ash777gg]

One month ago, I was too working on a similar project. In my experience, You can use winapi to change the wallpaper repeatedly, but its smoothness depends on system power. I was able to play a low quality choppy video using Winapi. But it can often cause explorer to crash/freeze the wallpaper frames. It could work better if you use it outside the vm.

[@FlyTechVideos]

Thanks for sharing!

[@lvan_figure]

​@@FlyTechVideoscan you show me about Windows for Android emulator for the free

[@ItsKeffori]

@@lvan_figure there is no windows emulators

[@CuteePieTheVideoEditor2021]

😢😊😅😢😅😢

[@CuteePieTheVideoEditor2021]

​@@FlyTechVideos😊😊😊😊

[@LeonAlkoholik67]

No GPU accelerated solution? CPU only sounds kinda terrible from a performance standpoint, when wanting to keep the system as responsive as possible

[@cooolgamer-vanced]

The fly is back! And with interesting stuff as always, I didn't tried to use animated wallpapers so I didn't knew they was removed because I knew you could do that on windows 98

[@plashplash-fg6hd]

Hey, Flytech, I’m glad you’re back with these amazing videos!

[@clearcodee_]

I use Lively Wallpaper as well. Cool thing is you can extend the background if you have more than 1 monitor.

[@FavoritoHJS]

Here's a stupid idea: Back in windows 98, M$ had the ""good"" idea of creating active desktop -- basically an internet exploder window as a wallpaper. I wonder if that still exists in Windows 11... PS: I wonder if CPU usage can be lowered by using a hardware-accelerated codec -- usually h264 works but on really old hardware you might need MPEG-2. You'll need to try outside a VM, though.

[@supercellex4D]

no, it won't. XP axed it, maybe it never got added to Windows NT

[@Kiki79250CoC]

@@supercellex4D In fact Active Desktop can be installed on NT4 with the "Desktop Update" and was present by default on 2000 and XP, but it got removed with Vista.

[@I.____.....__...__]

It wasn't "good", it was good, at least at the time. We'd create desktop webpages with things like weather "widgets" and stuff. It was very cutting-edge and progressive. Of course, as the Internet grew and more people started using it, it became more dangerous and eventually had to be pulled. 😕

[@mrdiamond64]

@@supercellex4D it exists in XP. I remember while using my Windows XP PC, the background would sometimes turn white and say something about how active desktop failed to load.

[@bummbumm6]

You don't know how hard i screamed YEEEEES!! when you recommended lively instead of Wallpaper Engine or BionicX

[@supramix5124]

You're back finally! Good video too

[@trunkit8749]

How exactly does WallpaperEngine do the animation without lagging? I’d love to see a video on that!

[@backjump]

Welcome back FlyTech ^^

[@Lychkinn]

Good to see you post again!

[@ggorg0]

Whoa you're alive!

[@mathiaschalup]

First comment is here

[@duplicake4054]

Good to see you back!

[@cassini-studios88]

:OOOO the legend is back!!!! welcome back!

[@NoahDomingues]

Cheers for the new video, keep it up! =)

[@thisfeatureisbad]

I'm actually using Lively Wallpaper for a few months now an I love it! Nothing closed source or paid like the wallpaper engine.

[@Elytra17]

Bro never disappoints us with the music

[@AlexRaylight]

I'm curious what the resource usage would be for Wallpaper Engine, on the same system and with an equivalent wallpaper. (On my system, Wallpaper Engine uses almost 0% CPU and around 14% GPU.)

[@pseudoforceyt]

The single most useful fly in the world has been resurrected!!

[@Cookie_360]

4:53 Synced with Music at the background 😂😂😂 Man, i love you and really missed you ❤😂

[@Windows-wj9jr]

bro you are back i was missing you very much. edit:ow btw i like your fly live wallpaper can i get that please ?

[@FlyTechVideos]

Sure bro here you go: flies.sh/5mdGYy

[@lumieas]

the legend's back yall

[@Shea7TDM]

the long awaited video

[@alduckez]

real

[@steve_1507]

Maybe if we used the GPU for decoding, it would run faster?

[@sgirix65]

It's actually pretty fast on real PCs, works smoothly on a 5th gen Intel laptop without any discrete GPU.

[@steve_1507]

@@sgirix65 too bad it was "removed" in newer versions, I think there might still be remnants of Dreamscene in windows 11

[@sgirix65]

@@steve_1507 sorry, I didn't mention that I meant the Lively Wallpaper.

[@alwaystrue]

Before I saw section 7, I was about to go into the comments suggesting lively wallpaper XD

[@lior_haddad]

papa john's dude

[@idk_21136]

After all these years, hes back

[@kevinwong_2016]

Finally uploaded ❤️

[@JustPyroYT]

Cool Video! ❤ :D

[@blacktoad34]

Hes back from his slumber after 5 months

[@coolchannelyt]

HE'S BACK

[@Yarpopcat08]

Didn't know about the Windows Vista&7 official live wallpaper. I guess you can migrate Win7 files to Win 11, and maybe mod something to work. Actually I'll go and to that right now. Thank you for giving me something to do! Nice video!

[@robertplayz9157]

Did it work?

[@alexandermcclure6185]

Please we must know if it functioned! We are dying to know!!! (no wait, that's just me dying in general :[ )

[@dominiksalata4234]

Thank you for recommending Lively Wallpaper.

[@C00LSH4RK]

FLY TECH FINALLY MADE A VIDEO!

[@ErrorGeometryDash]

Nice

[@thepikachugamer]

DREAMSCENE MY LOVE. Unfortunately Windows 7 is out of support and a bunch of stuff dont work on it so yeah i dropped it

[@emilyofjane]

Butterflies on Desktop walked so Flies on Desktop could run

[@arrax_s]

YOU RETURNED!

[@KornBirdOne]

YOU'RE BACK!!!

[@redgray408isapest]

1:30 bouncing thing: please pretend that the the wallpaper is animated. me: *ignores the bouncing thing*

[@white_mage]

using a video with slower framerate and lower bitrate might lower cpu usage but im lazy to test right now. hopefully i'll eventually bring back my animated w7 wallpapers

[@BuddyPlot]

Yes, I remember the easter eggs video!

[@user-gh2ys6jb3u]

When my pc broke, I installed the wrong iso file from the official Microsoft page that shutdown every 20-30 minutes or so(because it's license had expired). It took me so long to realise it and I almost just bring it to repair. I have a question: Can we broke the license or at lease break the shutdown system to continusing using the pc?

[@BlueSheep777]

fly is back!

[@gioyous]

the last one is the one i'll use because it has a wallpaper connected to the pc audio, so it's better. the wallpaper will be fully red with earrapes..... blood.

[@weizkule]

fun fact btw GIFs are animated if u set them as wallpapers on XP and under

[@SirAU]

Getting a FlyTech video after 5 months:

[@lambda256]

You should make a video on how there can be 2 desktop.ini files on the desktop at the same time and Windows doesn't confuse them.

[@FlyTechVideos]

Your wish is my command: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYqbZYFmo95rra8

[@CuteePieTheVideoEditor2021]

​@@FlyTechVideoso.o

[@alexstuf3]

🔥🔥

[@micXfam]

I'm not sure how Microsoft perfected DreamScene back in the day, I have the Ultimate Extras and I'm using it with 6 other windows open at once and no lag on my 12 year old laptop!

[@GunnerSiIva]

The lag présent was probably from the VM

[@micXfam]

@@GunnerSiIva true, especially if there wasn't vmware tools on or a problem with hardware acceleration in the VM

[@DanTDMJace]

I would use a Timer for your wallpaper cycler. The lag is mostly because you used Sleep

[@Ivan-fy3pr]

Would sleep cause explorer to crash, though?

[@DanTDMJace]

@@Ivan-fy3prMaybe. Sleep hogs system resources like it's no one's buisness.

[@I.____.....__...__]

Kid: _Mom, can we get DreamScene?_ Mom: _We have Active Desktop at home._ - 3:05 Yes, I know about VLC's wallpaper mode. I'm reminded of it every time I accidentally press W while watching stuff. 😒 (Yes, I have wallpaper mode disabled in the VLC settings, but that doesn't stop it. Bug? 🤷) - 3:55 Turn wallpaper mode off in the settings, restarting VLC, then pressing W to activate wallpaper mode; that doesn't play it fullscreen, it only replaces the desktop, and the taskbar and start menu are unaffected (but you still can't see desktop icons). - 4:18 Back in 1995, I got a copy of a program that would allow you to use an animated desktop/wallpaper in Windows 3.x. I have no idea what it was called; I tried searching for it over the years but always came up empty. 😕 The closest I could find was a program called ScreenPaper which lets you use screensavers as the desktop/wallpaper, and still works (at least up to Windows 7), but it's from the Windows 9x days, so it's not that original Win3 one. 🤔 - 5:08 This is because when you set the wallpaper, Windows transcodes it to a BMP file. Try pre-converting the images so that it can just set them directly and skip that extra processing. (Also, iirc, setting the wallpaper broadcasts WM_SETTINGCHANGE to all windows, which is going to eat up CPU cycles.)

[@christolius]

finally

[@gruetzig]

how does wallpaper engine do it is my question now

[@alexowk95]

Now i can get rid of ny anime wallpaper for this

[@blink4252]

There's also a (new) one which is Razer Axon. The only downside is you can't choose your own videos. But you can do AI generated art.

[@defaultuserADOFAIPC]

The sequence is 1000/5 equal how many wallpaper changes in 1 second. Set to 20 it will lag all your vm

[@tuckfuddyduddy]

ahh, that DS Activator, alongside with UXTheme Patcher and ResHack makes customizng Wndows accrding in how I want it back then,

[@popd1603]

What Happens if you set all the registry Keys to 0 ?

[@ElijahGames69]

also what about razor axon?

[@candycaneannihalator2708]

ironic the only version that officially has it doesnt work

[@FlyTechVideos]

Probably a VM lag issue

[@penguincute3564]

Couldn’t you set a moving image as the background?

[@jasonbond4140]

A fun video to do with lively wallpapers is Error ( Yes that's the name ).

[@phonl1]

Why are you using the outdated version of Windows 11?(judging by the old search icon and the old task manager)

[@jasonbond4140]

Fun fact: Livly Wallpaper is also in the official Microsoft store?

[@xorxpert]

Before any tools existed, I hacked ShellView of explorer to render stuff behind icons.

[@user-cp1bl3rd7v]

After installing a windows xp my dual boot is not showing I have a win 8 lite in a disk and win 10 lite in another diskbut after installing win xp in another another disk my dual boot is gone But i have a win 7 cd and i run cmd prompt and i use bootrec commands And the dual boot showing now but without win xp Pls how to dual boot win xp and this 2 windows Pls answer i wan this winxp for my potato pc 10 fps minecraft

[@TBDev10]

Hey FlyTech, you are taking too long to make videos every months dude💀but keep up the good work!

[@FlyTechVideos]

Brooooooooooo I'm doing my best, already editing my next video

[@UltimatePerfection]

VLC background works perfectly on Linux though.

[@wardrich]

This seemed cool until I realized that I pretty much never actually see my dekstop since I've always got stuff running

[@rockernan89-gaming]

You should make the background the DVD screensaver in another video

[@defaultuserADOFAIPC]

What happens if you set DWORDs to Byte?

[@benjaluth07]

Dude thought you were dead😂😅

[@FlyTechVideos]

Risen from the ashes

[@maxgladiator-re8xy]

hey look I am here

[@iamdarkyoshi]

Silly Fly, just set a gif as the wallpaper in XP :)

[@jkuser0official]

wallpaper engine has left the chat

[@giakhangnguyen1898]

Hey Fly can you make a video of customize Windows using Regedit (Change Background,colors,etc,....)

[@TheGodlyDekaFumoLucy]

But hey flies

[@Fafua1990Furry]

I love win 7 UwU

[@YoFGFelix1000]

on my windows 10 i used lively wallpaper compatible for windows 11/10

[@tauon_]

why was mpv using so much cpu? lol

[@null234]

lol i made a program like a year ago or so that attaches to the wallpaper of windows 10 playing a gif :D

[@Humaneriiing]

Does that work in Python even?

[@atsizbalik]

bro came back from the milk store

[@LivieRBicyclist]

Could you find a way to make Dreamscene run on Windows 10/11?

[@Emayeah]

that would be a hard task, implementing a feature that was on previous versions of windows on a new one. if just needing to copy some files to windows 10 from windows 7 / vista (edit: *works) it would probably result in a buggy mess due to windows changing a lot in the past decade

[@Zorro_no]

@@Emayeah yes, "changing". Fucking updates being layered above each other is changing?

[@Emayeah]

@@Zorro_no i mean his idea can create a buggy mess... and windows 11 released 2 years ago, windows 10 released 8 years ago, i think at least something changed

[@ArturoDrives]

Could you please make a video supporting enderman and his situation with youtube?

[@someguy2272]

i missed it😭

[@Diamondsigmaspaceb]

I use lively wallpaper

[@Cart1416]

hi fly

[@maikehxmaikeh2029]

FLIEGEEEE!!!! >:DDDD

[@FlyTechVideos]

__.

[@maikehxmaikeh2029]

@@FlyTechVideos oh hi wie gehts

[@eepyeri]

1:15 DreamScene, not Dreamscape

[@FlyTechVideos]

Oh right, missed that, thanks

[@DMARtunes]

Blue Firefox?? How?

[@FlyTechVideos]

Firefox Nightly

[@anamoyeee]

how can something as simple as changing the wallpaper take so much of cpu processing power?