Zyv-Wallpapers puts a video behind your icons — looping, hardware-decoded, with sound if you want it. And it stops the moment something covers the desktop, so a moving background never costs you a frame in a game.
That is the whole download. Live-wallpaper apps normally ship an entire browser
engine and weigh hundreds of megabytes — our own Zyv-Scan is 72 MB and it does
far less to your screen. This one is a Python program driving mpv,
the video player your system already has.
$ zyv-wallpapers
hwdec: vaapi · loop: inf
watching desktop visibility…
01 An ordinary desktop. Except the background is moving.
02 Pull it apart and there are layers. The video sits at the very back — above the root window, below everything you actually use.
03 The window is input-transparent, so your clicks never land on it. Icons, right clicks, drag-select — all behave exactly as before.
04 Now open something full screen. The desktop is hidden, so the video stops — and the power it was drawing goes with it.
05 Close it and the wallpaper picks up where it left off. You never told it to do any of that.
This is the thing that kills every other live wallpaper: it keeps decoding video behind your maximised browser, your editor, your game — burning battery and GPU on pixels nobody is looking at.
Zyv-Wallpapers watches the desktop. The moment a window is maximised or goes full screen, playback stops. The moment you can see the desktop again, it resumes. Nothing to configure and nothing to remember.
It listens for X11 visibility events, and falls back to asking
xdotool and wmctrl what the active window is doing —
so it still works on desktops that report visibility badly.
Intel and AMD hardware decoders do the work. Your CPU stays out of it.
Off by default. Turn it on and you can push past 100% when a clip is quiet.
No black frame at the seam, no restart flicker.
It holds until X and audio are actually up, instead of failing at login.
Every dependency is declared in the package, so your system pulls them in on its own.
sudo apt install ./zyv-wallpapers_1.0.0_all.debBrings in mpv, GTK 4, Libadwaita, xdotool and wmctrl with it.
Open Zyv-Wallpapers from your applications menu and browse to any video file. MP4, WEBM, MKV — whatever mpv plays, it plays.
That is it. Turn on audio if you want it, leave auto-pause alone, and it will come back by itself at the next login.
Better to find out here than after the install.
The engine puts its window at desktop level and makes it input-transparent using X11 extensions. Wayland deliberately does not allow either, so there is nothing to fall back to — it will not run.
Ubuntu 22.04 and later log you into Wayland by default. At the login screen, click the gear and choose “Ubuntu on Xorg”. On Zorin OS, Mint Cinnamon and Xfce you are already on X11.
Check which you are on
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
Hardware decoding makes this cheap, not free. A 4K sixty-frame clip will use more power than a 1080p thirty-frame one, and on a laptop running on battery you will notice the difference.
Auto-pause covers the case that actually matters — full-screen work and games — but if you live on battery, pick a shorter, smaller clip and it will barely register.
Tested on
Zorin OS · Ubuntu · Mint
No account, no credits, no upgrade sitting behind a button. Zyv-Wallpapers does not touch your Zyvavo balance and never will — there is nothing here to sell you.
Debian, Ubuntu, Zorin and Mint. Requires an X11 session — see above.
Yes, and permanently. There is no account, no credit balance and no paid tier hiding behind a feature. It is MIT licensed.
Video decoding runs on your GPU through VA-API, not your processor, so the cost is small to begin with. And whenever a window covers the desktop the playback stops entirely, which is most of the time you are actually working.
Almost certainly because you are in a Wayland session. Run echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE — if it says wayland, log out, click the gear icon at the login screen and pick “Ubuntu on Xorg”.
Yes. The wallpaper window is input-transparent, which means the X server passes every click through it to whatever is underneath. Icons, right-click menus and drag-selection all behave exactly as they did before.
Yes. It installs an autostart entry that waits for the X server and the audio system to be ready before it starts, rather than firing at login and failing.
Anything mpv can play, which is essentially everything — MP4, WEBM, MKV, MOV. For a wallpaper, a short clip that loops cleanly at 1080p is the sweet spot.
No. It is built on X11 and mpv through GTK, which is a Linux stack. Windows already has good options for this; Linux did not, which is why it exists.