Today’s write-up is a short one because I get so many questions about how to run animated wallpapers on desktop. I am not exaggerating this, let’s be honest we normally exaggerate some things but not the number of questions I’ve got about what’s going on with the moving desktop wallpaper which of course you can’t really do in Windows default settings.
So how am i doing it? Well it’s actually really simple but it will cost you a small amount of money. But not much though, all you need to do is go to Steam, you need to find Wallpaper Engine under the software section. This costs around $2.50 and it’s probably the best selling software on Steam.
You need to purchase the software and install this. It’s not a very big download at all. This uses your graphics card and your processor but in tiny amounts we’re talking less than 1% to actually make your desktop wallpaper move and you can get a load of different cool ones so you’ve seen quite a few different ones. We can make a little playlist and I leave the ones I use down below for you. It’s just really clever because it’s very subtle way of making your setup just a little bit cleaner. You can have things like the Star Wars where at first glance it doesn’t really look like that much is going on but it just adds that little bit of life to your setup.
The thing I really like about it is just how many there are to choose from because this is a Steam Workshop, a bit of software there are literally endless amounts that you can download and install yourself. You can make them yourself as well which I probably will have a go at some point I tried doing it and it turned out a little bit funny I guess it requires a few hours of actually getting used to it. You can add a sort of warping effects, you can make water shimmer and move you can add particles which they’re probably the most overused thing in wallpaper engine but you can also grab a movie and then turn that into a wallpaper as well.
But should you actually go ahead and do this? Well for 2.50 dollars I really don’t think that there’s any reason not to because you’re not actually on your desktop then the resources will be freed up and it won’t actually be moving your wallpaper at all which does ask the question how we useful this actually is?
Then again there are loads of us that will probably be writing something down on a notepad people still do that doing something else in the room listening to music all of these things and if there is you and you do often have your desktop wallpaper open then this is highly recommended and you can go and check it out.
Here are some of the features supported by Wallpaper engine and the specifications required to run it on your system.
Features:
- Bring your desktop alive with realtime graphics, videos, applications or websites.
- Personalize your wallpapers with your favorite colors.
- Use interactive wallpapers that can be controlled with your mouse.
- Support for many aspect ratios and native resolutions including 16:9, 21:9, 16:10, 4:3.
- Support for multi-monitor environments.
- Wallpapers will pause while playing games.
- Create your own wallpapers with the Wallpaper Editor.
- Animate new live wallpapers from static images or import HTML or video files for the wallpaper.
- Use the Steam Workshop to share your wallpapers.
- Wallpaper Engine can be used in parallel to any other Steam game or application.
- Supported video formats: mp4, WebM (Workshop); mp4, WebM, avi, m4v, mov, wmv (local files).
Recommended Requirements:
OS | Windows 8.1, 10 |
Processor | 2.0 GHz Intel i7 or equivalent |
Memory | 2048 MB RAM |
Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, AMD HD7870, 2 GB VRAM or above |
DirectX | Version 11 |
Storage | 1024 MB available space |