Live wallpapers are not a new concept anymore. In fact, pretty much all phones and tablets offer this feature, and, even though not out-of-the-box, computers can also support live wallpapers.
If live wallpapers are not your thing, and you want something “more,” you might want to try setting a video as your desktop’s wallpaper on Linux. This is possible with the help of an interesting app called Hidamari (which means “sunny spot” in Japanese).
Similar to Xwinwrap + mpv and Komorebi
Even though Hidamari is not the first app of this sort, it does offer pretty much the same basic functionality as other similar software, with the addition of a few nice little features.
For starters, it allows you to apply static wallpapers with a blur effect (keep in mind that video frames can be applied as system wallpaper), control the volume of the video, and mute/pause the playback anytime with just two clicks.
Besides setting local videos as wallpaper, the app also allows you to play videos from YouTube and other similar video sharing websites directly onto the desktop (as wallpapers), as well as set webpages as wallpaper.
There’s more
In terms of under-the-hood features, we need to point out that Hidamari has support for hardware accelerated video decoding, multi-monitor support, as well as GNOME Wayland support.
The hardware acceleration uses VLC as the backend, and when playing videos from video sharing platforms yt-dlp is used as the backend.
Conclusion
Hidamari is a young project, and there are still a lot of improvements left to be done, at least according to the project’s GitHub repository page. One of the most exciting future improvements is better integration with the GNOME Shell. All in all, Hidamari is an interesting app that’s sure to appeal to users who want to animate their desktops via live wallpapers or video wallpapers.
