Everything Lively Wallpaper offers — from hardware-accelerated video playback and shader rendering to machine-learning depth effects and full CLI automation. One free, open-source app for a truly living desktop.
Lively supports six distinct wallpaper types. Every format is hardware-accelerated, customizable through LivelyProperties, and compatible with multi-monitor setups.
Play MP4, WebM, AVI, and MOV files as desktop wallpapers with full hardware-accelerated decoding via the MPV and VLC rendering backends. Apply customizable video filters — brightness, contrast, saturation, hue — in real time. DirectShow fallback ensures broad codec compatibility with K-Lite and LAV packs.
Use lightweight GIF and WebP animated loops as wallpapers. Ideal for pixel art, retro aesthetics, and simple looping animations. Because these formats are decoded on the CPU with minimal overhead, they consume significantly less CPU and GPU than video wallpapers — perfect for older hardware or battery-sensitive laptops.
Render any web content on your desktop using a Chromium-based engine (CEF). Full support for JavaScript, CSS animations, Canvas, and WebGL. Paste a Shadertoy.com URL directly and Lively will load it as a live wallpaper — no download needed. Build interactive dashboards, clocks, or generative art with standard web technologies.
Load GLSL shader wallpapers that run directly on the GPU in real time. Get fluid, generative visuals — plasma, fractals, particle fields — with minimal CPU usage. Expose customizable parameters via LivelyProperties so users can tweak colors, speed, complexity, and more from the settings panel without editing code.
Run Unity and Godot game-engine projects as interactive desktop wallpapers. Display fully rendered 3D scenes, particle systems, and physics simulations right on your desktop. Users can interact with the wallpaper via mouse input, making the desktop a playground for interactive 3D art and mini-games.
Paste a YouTube video URL or any streaming video link and Lively will play it directly as your desktop wallpaper. No need to download the file first — content streams in real time through the embedded web renderer. Great for live feeds, ambient scenes, and music video loops.
Lively is designed to stay out of your way. Intelligent pause rules ensure animated wallpapers never interfere with gaming, battery life, or remote work sessions.
When a fullscreen application or game is detected, Lively instantly pauses all wallpaper playback and rendering. CPU and GPU usage drops to approximately 0%, so your game gets every available resource. Playback resumes automatically the moment you alt-tab or exit the fullscreen app.
On laptops, Lively can pause wallpaper playback automatically when the device switches to battery power. This prevents animated wallpapers from draining your battery during travel or meetings. Playback resumes when you plug back in — no manual intervention required.
Configure custom pause behavior for individual applications. For example, keep wallpapers running while using a browser but pause them when launching a specific creative tool or IDE. Rules are saved per executable name, giving you fine-grained control over when Lively consumes resources.
Lively detects Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sessions and automatically pauses wallpaper playback. This prevents unnecessary GPU and bandwidth usage on the host machine during remote access. Ideal for IT professionals and remote workers who connect to their desktops from other devices.
Whether you have two screens or six, Lively handles every display independently or as one unified canvas. Full support for mixed DPI and mixed resolution setups.
Stretch a single wallpaper seamlessly across all connected displays. Lively calculates the combined desktop geometry and renders one continuous animation that flows from monitor to monitor — great for panoramic landscapes, abstract visuals, and immersive setups.
Assign a different wallpaper to each monitor. Mix and match wallpaper types — play a video on your main display, a shader on your secondary, and an HTML5 clock on your third. Each wallpaper runs in its own process with independent playback controls.
Route wallpaper audio output to specific audio devices per monitor where supported. For example, send the audio from your main display's wallpaper to your headphones while keeping a secondary display silent. Prevents audio overlap in multi-monitor workflows.
Lively correctly handles setups with mixed DPI scaling and different resolutions. A 4K display at 150% scaling alongside a 1080p display at 100% scaling works without visual artifacts, misalignment, or blurry rendering. Wallpapers render at native resolution on each display.
Bring your desktop to life with music. Lively captures system audio and feeds it to wallpapers that can react to beats, frequency, and volume in real time.
Each monitor's wallpaper can have independent audio output. Control volume per display or mute individual wallpapers. On multi-monitor setups, this prevents conflicting audio from different wallpapers playing simultaneously.
Lively captures the system audio stream and routes frequency and amplitude data to wallpapers via the Lively API. HTML5 and shader wallpapers can access an audio graph to create music visualizers, reactive particle effects, or beat-synced animations — all driven by whatever music you are playing.
Wallpaper audio is automatically muted when idle or when the screen is locked. This prevents ambient wallpaper sound from playing in an empty room. Audio resumes when you return to the desktop and interact with the system.
Build or download wallpapers that react to any audio playing on your system — Spotify, YouTube, games, or any other source. The audio graph API provides frequency bins and amplitude levels that wallpapers use to animate bars, particles, colors, and geometry in sync with your music.
Turn any flat image into an immersive 3D scene. Lively uses on-device AI to estimate depth and create parallax effects — no cloud service required.
Lively runs a machine-learning depth estimation model to generate a depth map from any ordinary photograph. The model analyzes the image locally on your GPU, identifying foreground and background layers without sending data to any server.
Using the generated depth map, Lively creates a parallax 3D effect that shifts foreground and background layers as you move your mouse. Static photos become immersive, living scenes. Works with any JPEG, PNG, or WebP image — landscapes, portraits, illustrations, and more.
All ML processing runs entirely on your local GPU. There is no cloud dependency, no internet requirement, and no data leaves your machine. Inference is fast on modern GPUs and the depth map is cached, so subsequent loads are instant.
Replace the default Windows screensaver with any Lively wallpaper. Full integration with the native Windows screensaver system, including multi-monitor support.
Lively registers itself as a native Windows screensaver provider. Configure it through the standard Windows screensaver settings dialog (Screen Saver Settings). Set timeout, require password on resume, and preview — all through the familiar Windows interface.
Use any wallpaper type — video, GIF, HTML5, shader, or game — as your screensaver. The same wallpaper running on your desktop can double as your screensaver, or you can choose a completely different one. No conversion or export needed.
The screensaver mode extends to all connected displays. In span mode, one screensaver covers every monitor; in per-display mode, each monitor can show its own screensaver wallpaper. Matches your desktop wallpaper layout or uses an independent configuration.
Script your desktop. Lively exposes a powerful command-line interface and a real-time API so you can integrate wallpaper control into any workflow or automation tool.
Control Lively from the command line. Switch wallpapers, change displays, adjust volume, pause and resume playback — all through documented CLI arguments. Schedule wallpaper changes via Windows Task Scheduler or integrate into shell scripts for fully automated desktop theming.
Call Lively commands from Python scripts using subprocess or any HTTP/IPC approach. Build custom dashboards that change your wallpaper based on time of day, weather, calendar events, or system metrics. Python's ecosystem makes the automation possibilities virtually limitless.
Bind hotkeys to wallpaper actions using AutoHotKey. Press a key combination to cycle wallpapers, toggle playback, or switch between profiles. AHK's scripting language pairs perfectly with Lively's CLI for creating keyboard-driven desktop customization workflows.
The Lively API exposes real-time data streams that wallpapers can consume: hardware sensor readings (CPU/GPU temperature, usage, RAM), a full audio frequency graph for music visualizers, and now-playing music metadata (track title, artist, album art). Build wallpapers that react to your system state in real time.
A modern interface built with WinUI 3, deep Windows 11 integration, and a flexible property system that lets wallpaper creators expose any parameter to end users.
Lively's UI is built with WinUI 3, Microsoft's modern native UI framework. It follows Windows 11 design guidelines — Mica material, rounded corners, smooth animations, and dark mode by default. The interface feels like a first-party Windows app.
Lively adopts Windows 11's design language throughout: acrylic and mica backdrops, the Segoe Fluent icon set, context menus that match the system style, and proper support for light/dark theme switching. It blends in perfectly with the rest of the OS.
Customize the Windows taskbar appearance to complement your wallpaper. Lively can adjust taskbar transparency and color to create a cohesive desktop aesthetic that matches your animated background.
Wallpaper creators define customizable parameters via a JSON-based LivelyProperties file. End users see sliders, color pickers, dropdowns, and toggles in the Lively UI — no code editing required. Change colors, speeds, particle counts, text, and any other exposed value on the fly.
Package and share wallpapers as .lively-zip files. This format bundles the wallpaper assets, metadata, thumbnail, and LivelyProperties into a single archive. Recipients double-click the file and Lively imports it automatically — no manual file management needed.