need help with animated desktop wallpaper

X

xc_runner713

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 21, 2007
Messages
84
okay so i began editing a few things when i got bored changed the windows theme to zune and i thought of an idea would it be possible to make a dark side of the moon themed animated desktop like take a clip from here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmjS37zDbPY
or maybe one of the other parts but i think you get the general idea of what im trying to do here

does anyone have any knowledge on making animated wallpapers is this gonna be really difficult because im not really all that savvy but i think if this is successful it will be mesmerizing
 
Windows Ultimate comes with the abillity to download a program called "deam scene" which allows for an animated desktop.
 
well i do not have windows ultimate so what alternatives do i have

yeah i can understand why an animated desktop would be awful but this is a really simple one that i dont think would be that awful
 
Simple ones are just as bad. Any kind of motion in the background is just a downright bad idea, and I strongly recomend against it.

'sides, I don't know how to do it in Windows.
 
Download VLC. Save the youtube file with a FF extension or whatever. Open it in VLC in "wallpaper" mode on loop. Problem solved; if you don't mind having VLC constantly running...
 
Animated desktops look terrible. You could try a dynamic desktop via stardocks object desktop or something similiar though
 
With what is built-in to XP, an animated GIF is your only animated desktop option...

A lot of CPU drain for a background of any size.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Animated backgrounds is a horrible idea, trust me on that. I've tried it. Awful, sooo awful.
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Haven't tried dream scene but I agree with Morty, it was always a huge resource HOG when I tried it. Its like running a fullscreen video game in the background at all times.
 
MadJuggla9 said:
Haven't tried dream scene but I agree with Morty, it was always a huge resource HOG when I tried it. Its like running a fullscreen video game in the background at all times.
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I didn't dislike it because of the resource hogginess (the nature of Mac OS X's drawing system means it doesn't really use that much anyway); I disliked it because it placed undue stress on my eyes. It's like reading while sitting in a car. You're trying to focus on the text, but your eyes want to focus on the stuff that's moving...

This is why I also tend not to visit websites with too many animated adverts.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
(the nature of Mac OS X's drawing system means it doesn't really use that much anyway)
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HAHAHA

please, the actual blitting of the image to the screen has nothing to do with why this would consume system resources... I am sure DX9 has a hell of a time drawing an image to the screen and that OS X can do it SOOO much faster.... you know, thats why OS X is the choice for gamers, not XP with DX9 :rolleyes:

but why would I know, I only write software using DX9...
 
ok so i found this program called DreamRender and i can take a video and turn it directly into a wallpaper but for some reason im having trouble with the DivX and converting it and whatnot so i think im gonna use windows media encoder and encode it from youtube and then go from there it will be maybe 20 seconds of actual video and i dont think i will be distracted it will be an image moving from right to left only in the middle 1/3 of the screen and i dont think it will take up to much processing power as the quality will be really low not that it matters its an image that was printed on cardboard not much to render a few colored lines anyone else here into dark side of the moon or any floyd in general
 
The content of the video doesn't much matter when it encoded into something like divx, basically all the CPU usage will come from on the fly decoding. Good luck with that, i would never do it, you would be better of with an animated GIF as far as resource usage goes, it would still look silly though.

If you absolutely have to use a video you should try to get a raw, uncompressed source without audio and use that instead of one with any kind of compression... it will take up 10 times as much hard drive space but won't constantly be using 10 percent of your CPU.

*edit* ...and before anyone thinks they are smart I am aware that in certain circumstances the opposite of the above is true, that a certain compressed video may render faster than its uncompressed counterpart. The only time this is the case though is when the bitrate of the video exceeds the bandwidth of the system bus, being unable to transfer the necessary data to render the frame at the correct framerate. On modern architectures this will almost only occur with high definition video, which youtube certaintly is not
 
CodeX said:
HAHAHA

please, the actual blitting of the image to the screen has nothing to do with why this would consume system resources... I am sure DX9 has a hell of a time drawing an image to the screen and that OS X can do it SOOO much faster.... you know, thats why OS X is the choice for gamers, not XP with DX9 :rolleyes:

but why would I know, I only write software using DX9...
Click to expand...
What? My point is that since the GUI in Mac OS X is essentially just an OpenGL scene, rendering something like a Quartz animation (vector animation rendered on the GPU) onto the background isn't really much of a resource hog. It's all done on the video card, and it has plenty of resources to spare most of the time.

What you write software with is irrelevant.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
What? My point is that since the GUI in Mac OS X is essentially just an OpenGL scene, rendering something like a Quartz animation (vector animation rendered on the GPU) onto the background isn't really much of a resource hog. It's all done on the video card, and it has plenty of resources to spare most of the time.
Click to expand...

Nevermind, I was under the assumption he was talking about full motion video not some generated thing, in which case the decoding of the video would be the major impact on performance. If you are talking about some program that generates things to be drawn to the screen then that doesn't apply. Still, thinking that macs can render anything more efficiently than PC's is asinine.
 
CodeX said:
Nevermind, I was under the assumption he was talking about full motion video not some generated thing
Click to expand...
And I was under the exact opposite assumption. :p



Still, thinking that macs can render anything more efficiently than PC's is asinine.
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The window drawing system works differently. Without Vista/Aero, Mac OS X has a definite upper hand in terms of hardware acceleration for the GUI. With Aero turned on, they're pretty similar in terms of what's done on the GPU and what's done on the CPU.
 
you only see your wallpaper when nothing else is running on your computer...

animated wallpaper = screen saver
 
f1y said:
you only see your wallpaper when nothing else is running on your computer...

animated wallpaper = screen saver
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No, no.

The only applications I run full-screen, other than games, are Lightwave, modo and Photoshop. I never run my browser full-screen. It's just a pain in the neck (literally) with a 24" display.
 
sorry for not replying back in a while my internet went out

after playing world of warcraft while my task manager was running and saw that while in world of warcraft my cpu is running 100% so i dont know what this means but if theres a possibility that my desktop effects frame rates i say to hell with it
 
Games typically use as much power as they can get, regardless of whether they actually need it or not. Even StarCraft monopolizes my CPU.
 
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