today i want to show you how you can animate your desktop background in both windows 11 and also windows 10. by default in windows you can set a picture a solid color or a slideshow as your background those are all kind of boring a video is way cooler than that first we’ll look at how you can get this app then we’ll look at some of the customizations and lastly we’ll also look at what type of impact it has on your system’s performance all right let’s check this out to get lively wallpaper head to this website you’ll see a link right up above and i’ve also included a link down below in the description there are many different apps that provide this type of functionality but i think lively wallpaper is the best it’s free it’s open source it offers tons of customization it’s also really simple to use it supports multiple monitors and it just has all of the features that you would want an app like this to have the development team is really active so if there are bugs if you have feedback they respond to all of that so all in all this is just a really solid app on the website scroll all the way down to the bottom and you’ll find the download section and here you have two different options you can get the installer or you can get it through the microsoft store so which option should you choose i would recommend getting it through the microsoft store when you do that you’ll get all of the updates automatically with the installer you’ll have to manually check for updates periodically once you launch the app you’ll see an experience that looks like this to apply one of the animated backgrounds you simply click on it you can also right click on a background and you can customize it here for example i could set the color the amplitude the speed and even whether it should show a rainbow each background offers its own set of customizations some of the backgrounds even interact with your mouse movements the default backgrounds are all pretty nice but you might get tired of them over on the left hand side you can click on the plus icon and you can add even more backgrounds here for example i’ll drag over a video of one of my youtube videos and then i could watch kevin all day long maybe that’s a little bit too much kevin down below you can also enter in a website address if there’s a video there for example you could type in a youtube video url and youtube has tons of great looping videos down below you can also click on more wallpapers and this will take you to the developers reddit page where you’ll find all sorts of additional looping videos that you can use on your desktop in the intro i mentioned that this app has a ton of functionality and down in the bottom left hand corner we can click into settings to see more of this functionality first up under general you can decide whether or not this app starts with windows under performance you can decide when this app should run so let’s say you have an app that’s full screen or maybe you’re running on battery power you can pause this app next you have wallpaper you can decide how the video should fit and you can also decide the quality level next under audio if your video file has any sound or audio associated with it you can decide do you want to play that audio and if so you can decide what the volume level should be next you have system and this is a really cool feature you can set your taskbar to appear clear and there are also a few other options as well and the last category is miscellaneous and there are a few more settings here if you have multiple monitors up in the top right hand corner you can click on this icon and you can decide whether you want it to play on just one monitor or if you want it to span across multiple monitors to access lively wallpaper down in the bottom right hand corner in the system tray you’ll see an icon when you right click on that you’ll have access to some of the most common controls now of course all of this functionality is pretty phenomenal but you might be wondering what is the impact on your system performance if we open up task manager you’ll see that it doesn’t really use that much of your cpu it also doesn’t consume that much memory however when you look at your graphics card it places a little bit of a load on that i notice that it uses anywhere from seven percent all the way up to 15 percent now of course under performance and settings you can set it so if you have an app that’s full screen or maybe you’re on battery power you could set it to pause the background and that’ll reduce the consumption of those resources so you could make the call on whether you think this app is worthwhile i think it offers a pretty nice background and i think it’s worthwhile if you now have a much cooler background than you did when you started this video please give it a thumbs up to watch more videos like this in the future please consider subscribing alright i’ll see you next time [Music] you