LivePaper is a lightweight application that displays live wallpapers on Windows and Linux.
Both gif and video files are supported. If FFmpeg can play the file, LivePaper can show it as your desktop background.

Wallpaper art by Toyoi Yuuta

Use the latest prebuilt binaries: MSI installer or portable zip.

Build locally from source. Instructions are here.

Simply run live-paper.exe. You can make LivePaper run automatically at startup by following this guide from Microsoft (works for Windows 7+).

On its first run, LivePaper will open a window to choose the wallpaper file. The app will remember this file and play it the next time you run LivePaper. You can also change the wallpaper file or quit the app via the tray icon.

Note that if LivePaper quits due to an error, the remembered wallpaper file will be cleared. The next time the app is started, you will need to choose the wallpaper file again.

LivePaper is a console application on Linux.

Usage: live-paper [-h] [--fit-mode=<mode>] [--cache] <file>
Display a video or an animated file as desktop background.

  -h, --help   = display this help and exit
  --fit-mode=<mode>
               = controls the way the wallpaper is fit on screen
                 possible values: fit, fill, center
  --cache      = decode all frames at once and store them in memory
                 this option is available for short clips only (<=16 frames)
  <file>       = video or animation file to display

Examples: live-paper loop.mp4
          live-paper --fit-mode=fill --cache wallpaper.gif

Append & to run LivePaper in background. Run killall live-paper to stop it.

Visual Studio 2019 or later is recommended. CMake will download all dependencies during configuration when building with VS.

You can do everything from Visual Studio, if desired. Choose "Clone a repostiory..." from the startup menu to clone this repository. VS will configure the project using CMake. Then build as usual.

You can also build in terminal, similarly to the Linux instructions below. You need to install the requirements manually if using e.g. MinGW.

Install the requirements

• cmake 3.14
• ffmpeg OR libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavdevice-dev for Ubuntu and the like
• sdl2

Example for Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get -yq install cmake libsdl2-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavdevice-dev

For Arch

$ sudo pacman -S cmake sdl2 ffmpeg

Then clone the repository, configure and build with CMake.

$ git clone https://github.com/zuranthus/LivePaper.git && cd LivePaper
$ cmake -B build
$ cmake --build build

To test, run

$ ./build/live-paper assets/test.gif &

• Probably not all video file types are supported at the moment; let me know if your file doesn't work
• Unicode is not fully supported on Windows yet
• Doesn't work with compositors on Linux (yet?)
• App quits with an error if it finds any issue with the input file
• Only one display is supported

Art by Toyoi Yuuta is used for test wallpapers.