Thursday 24 April 2014

Re: Using video for my KDE wallpaper


I enjoy listening to music while I work and I enjoy the novelty of having moving wallpaper.  There are many ways to get a video to run as wallpaper in Linux.  Some of them need special application installed.  Some like Zorin, require you to buy a 'paid' version of their distribution.  

 
In my previous post I showed a couple  of ways to achieve video wallpaper in Linux with the KDE desktop.  

Here's an even simpler way to run video wallpaper without doing anything special.
It works far better than the other methods I have seen and also works on XFCE desktop.  It should work just as well on Gnome desktops.

Open a video in VLC
Make sure it is set to loop playlist (buttons on controls)

Right click the title bar
Move to Desktop > All desktops
More Actions > Keep below others
More Actions > Fullscreen (alternatively, double click on the running video)

The video should now run underneath any panels, docks and applications - just like wallpaper, but you can still right click it to get options.

If you start VLC without a video, you can use the sidebar to select a folder with videos in it to populate a playlist or manually create a playlist.

If the player controls still appear at the bottom there's an option to turn them off.

I hope this helps people who like to have music playing and moving wallpaper, with a reasonable CPU overhead. I have also used this method to run video wallpaper in XFCE. It should also work in GNOME. Only the title bar items have different names.

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