26 条评论
- fps-hero 15小时前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!”.
- jbs789 14小时前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.
- encore2097 1天前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!
- buildbot 1天前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!
- _kb 23小时前What do you mean Windows Vista "nostalgia"? That makes me feel a little long in the horn.
- harrouet 14小时前Vista is what made me get my first Mac. I hope Apple does not make the same mistake.
- Springtime 22小时前> That makes me feel a little long in the horn
I see what you did there :)
- ChrisMarshallNY 17小时前I attended the Longhorn event, where they played Director scripts, and told us it was “live code.”
- geerlingguy 22小时前There are likely a number of folks on this forum now who were born after Vista was released.
- _kb 22小时前Nope. 2007 is like 2 or 3 years ago, tops.
- charcircuit 17小时前Vista released over 19 years ago.
- stavros 17小时前You missed the joke.
- charcircuit 16小时前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.
- dspillett 16小时前> 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.
- samat 21小时前Still burned they did not ship winFS then
- breppp 20小时前Good thing it eventually grew to replace NTFS
- ebbi 23小时前guy_holding_shoulder.jpg
- asimovDev 17小时前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
- dspillett 16小时前> 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.
- riddlemethat 23小时前I’m imagining dozens of people worldwide sharing your nostalgia for Vista.
- Gigachad 23小时前It's called frutiger aero now. Lot of people very bored with modern safe design nostalgic for when tech and UI was weird and bold.
- darkwater 16小时前Let a sufficient amount of time pass, and what people knew in their children/teenage years will be remembered with nostalgia.
- voidUpdate 17小时前The funniest thing about the "frutiger aero" thing is that it looks nothing like how I remember vista looking
- zaps 23小时前“Good old Vista. People give it a bad press but I’m never upgrading, why would I? It just feels like a good pair of jeans.”
- wpm 22小时前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.
- postalcoder 23小时前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!
- mikestaas 22小时前OMG, LegacyScreenSaver is such a memory hog!
- tharropoulos 15小时前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.
- musicale 23小时前Apple's best video wallpaper is "Macintosh". I am interested in how it works.
- futhey 22小时前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.
- fphilipe 20小时前It features the current date and time with seconds, so it must be rendered on the fly.
- troybetz 20小时前The assets and some? of the scripting for it are in a bundle at:
/System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/WallpaperMacintoshExtension.appex
Can see the time and date being added here I think:
System6ControlPanel.program
// // System 6 Control Panel // Macintosh 40th Anniversary // // Copyright © 2024 Apple. All rights reserved. // //---------------------------------------------- start simultaneous scale out let image = "System6ControlPanel" ... ... add time at 267, 165 name "Geneva12" add date at 274, 239 name "Geneva12" end simultaneous
- p0w3n3d 14小时前Wow that's great work! Thanks!
- arkh 16小时前Reminds me how windows 98 allowed using a HTML page as background. Said HTML could include videos.
- somat 14小时前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.
- ellisd 17小时前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.
- ventana 18小时前Nice project, thank you for sharing!
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.
- kageroumado 18小时前Not much, Claude was trying different things on their own for hours. It was Opus 4.6, this public release was done by 4.7
- wanoir 1天前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!
- kageroumado 23小时前Thank you! I’m glad you like it
- dostick 16小时前How did you steer Claude for strict concurrency, can you share the CLAUDE.md?
- werdnapk 14小时前Where did they say they used AI for this?
- kageroumado 23小时前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!
- ggrelet 17小时前How did you bring up the page so quick? And what helped you design it?
- blazarquasar 17小时前It’s entirely designed by claude. Looks like every claude website out there.
- divan 17小时前And how did you style it like Anthropic design system? :D
- sixeyes 16小时前frieren spotted!
also, nice typography.
- shideneyu 17小时前Neat job. And that's interesting to see how it works. I hope to see apple connectivity being reversed engineered too on day
- mgaunard 1天前Are there specific video wallpaper sets I can download that leverage these features?
- kageroumado 1天前You can use any website that lets you download video wallpapers, or you can make one yourself. Any video can be played
- mgaunard 19小时前well I'd specifically want one that's well-designed to make use of the various features you pointed out: highlight battery level, thermals etc.
- buildbot 1天前I vote the Vista wallpapers personally; feels just right.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1天前Very cool!
However, it may definitely get broken by Apple, as you note.
- kageroumado 1天前I don’t think they’ll touch this part anytime soon. It’s been unchanged for a few years now, they certainly have other priorities.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1天前Good on ya.
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.
- dylan604 1天前Which generation is that? I'm a Gen Xer. I can't work without music, but specific music without lyrics for my brain to try to follow.
- ChrisMarshallNY 20小时前I’m a “late boomer” (born in ‘62).
- crimsontech 16小时前It doesn't move while you work, its just the lock screen and when you log in.
- ChrisMarshallNY 15小时前Cool. Thanks!
- markdown 1天前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...
- kageroumado 23小时前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.
- w-ll 1天前remember when windows had html wallpapers. brb gonaa agent something that i hope doenst supply chain my entire life
- hunter2_ 22小时前The little IE4 widgets called "active desktop"?
- throw310822 18小时前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.
- sixeyes 16小时前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
- Novosell 17小时前Making even the background run electron, eh?
- happymellon 15小时前Unfortunately it was IE.
- manuisin 23小时前Woah, thank you! Just checking these will keep on working on the lock screen and as screen savers too?
- kageroumado 23小时前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.
- contingencies 20小时前Suggested monetization strategy: porn.
- Jack_77 19小时前[flagged]
- costel_apostol 19小时前[flagged]
- nashashmi 23小时前Title should be prefixed with show hn:
- dang 23小时前I had the same thought and just did that, and your comment was the next thing I saw :)
- daemonologist 23小时前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.)
- JulianSmith1 18小时前[dead]
- zhangdake 20小时前[dead]