Windows Vista had in it animated wallpapers on desktop but sadly how they were heavy on system resources Microsoft abandoned the idea. Moving forward a couple of years later we have Windows 10 but still, we do not have live animated wallpapers. Since I am the kind of person who does not want to wait on Microsoft and now it is time to bring animated wallpapers back I am going to make one all by myself and you are welcome to join the ride and do the same for you as well.
Enough talk, let's dive into how we can make animated wallpaper for our Windows 10.
Choosing the application
First, we will need some form of application which can we look at our animated wallpapers and since they are animations it means video, so we will need a video player and what better choice than a VLC player, an open-source light weighs all-format player.
Get a
VLC player from
here and
install it.
Finding video source
The next thing is to of course have some looping video that we will use as background. There are many sites and ways to get seamless loop videos, I use
this youtube channel for my backgrounds. Altho you can use any video footage you want it is recommended that it is not too long, that it is hi-resolution so we do not have pixels on-screen, and if you can, get it as seamless since we do not want to see stutter when the video is lopped from the beginning.
So hopefully you have desired video and VLC player installed.
Putting it all together
Copy the following code and paste it into your search bar in Windows to open the Startup folder, or navigate to the Startup folder yourself via file explorer if you know where it is.
%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
Now, next thing is to copy and past the VLC shortcut into this folder so it is started when Windows is first time booted.
Right-click on the shortcut and in the edit field paste this:
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --video-wallpaper --qt-start-minimized --no-qt-fs-controller --repeat --no-video-title-show --qt-notification=0 "C:\videopath\filename.mp4"
where
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" is the path where VLC is installed, point this to where you have installed it
"C:\videopath\filename.mp4" is the path where you have your video that you wish to use as animated wallpaper. Please note also that in my case there is mp4 as an extension but it does not need to be mp4, just use any extension VLC can open and play.
Conclusion
And that's it, you have successfully made an animated background or live wallpaper on your Windows 10 computer. You can change your wallpaper anytime by editing shortcut and giving it a new path to a new video or simply overwrite the existing one with a new baring same name.