UbuntuHandbook

Want to play a video as animated background wallpaper? There’s now a new tool to do the job via GPU rendering.

Gpu Video Wallpaper is the project. As the name indicates, it uses GPU for rendering video with low CPU usage.

The software uses MPV to play video file. So mp4, mkv, flv, gif, and large list of video formats are supported. And it plays video animated wallpaper in Dual- or Multi-monitors.

1.) Download Gpu Video Wallpaper

You can either go to previous link, click ‘Code’ button and select ‘Download Zip’, or click on the button below to download it:

Download Zip

2.) Run the software to play animated wallpaper

Open file manager and un-compress the zip archive, then navigate to the source folder. There right-click on blank area and select “Open in Terminal”.

Next you can run command to play video as animated wallpaper:

./gpu-video-wallpaper /PATH/TO/VIDEO

The tool depends on xrandr, pcregrep, and mpv. First run may prompt either to install the dependencies or not. Type y and it will install them automatically.

3.) Stop the animated wallpaper:

Stop the command via Ctrl+C will not stop the animated wallpaper, you need to run below command in the same terminal window:

./gpu-video-wallpaper --stop

4.) Install the tool for system wide use:

If you like the software, and want to run the command anywhere in any terminal window, copy the executable files to /usr/local/bin via command:

sudo cp gpu-video-wallpaper xwinwrap /usr/local/bin/

Then you can use this command instead to play video as animated wallpaper:

gpu-video-wallpaper /PATH/TO/VIDEO

And adding --startup flag if you want to start animated wallpaper at login. So the command will be:

gpu-video-wallpaper --startup /PATH/TO/VIDEO

Want to use animated wallpapers on Ubuntu desktop? Well, you can try the new awesome wallpaper manager called Komorebi.

Komorebi is an open-source animated wallpaper manager for Linux. With it, you can set your desktop background with:

a picture with time & date.
a video wallpaper.
a web page.

The software ships with a list of default animated wallpapers. And there’s a Wallpaper Creator allows to manually create animated wallpapers from pictures, videos, or web pages.

How to Install and Use Komorebi in Ubuntu:

You can download the 64-bit deb, so far it’s “komorebi-2.1-64-bit.deb” from the release page:

Then install the package either via Gdebi (install it via Ubuntu Software) or by running command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/komorebi-*.deb; sudo apt-get -f install

Once installed, launch Komorebi from your software launcher:

Then right-click on desktop, and choose Change wallpaper. There you can change animated wallpapers and do some basic settings.

Manually create animated wallpapers:

The software offers Wallpaper Creator utility. Open it from software launcher and you can do following steps to create an animated wallpaper from pic, video, or a web page.

1. When Wallpaper Creator launches: