Wednesday 23 April 2014

Video Wallpaper for KDE desktop - Dead Easy!

For years many of us in the Linux world have been writing or modifying scripts to make a video or flash animation play play desktop wallpaper.



Linux has a number of media players that can handle video.  One of the best of these is VLC.  The steps below will allow a Linux user with the KDE desktop to run a video as desktop wallpaper and have volume available if wanted.

Open a video in VLC
IMPORTANT On the video control buttons at the bottom, second from the right is a button for Loop All - Loop One - No Loop
Choose Loop All or Loop One - So your video plays continually.
Right click the title bar
Choose More Actions > Special Application Settings
(Special Windows settings also works but I don;t know what the difference is yet)
Choose Arrangement & Access tab
Check mark in Keep Below and choose Force and Yes
Click OK
Double click your video to make it full screen.

That's it!  You should now have a full screen wallpaper.  You can easily write a little script to make it start any time you like, or at startup.  Like this, for example.





You can easily set up a playlist of several videos, and by moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen (or right clicking the desktop, skip to the next video on the list.

By making the correct selection on the loop button you can choose to play one video over and over, or run through the whole playlist and start again.

This works well when using music videos as your wallpaper because you still have a quick easy access to volume settings.

Apparently the right click titlebar actions are not available in GNOME desktop.



Ok, here's an EDIT
Make a folder called Music-Videos and drop a few music videos into it.

Make a file called vlc-wallpaper
Make it executable (right click > properties > permissions)
Drag this 'empty' vlc-wallpaper script to a Panel
Right Click and open Icon Settings
Choose Application
In Command replace the existing line with:
/find Music-Videos/ -type f -exec vlc -f --loop --random -LZ '{}' +
SAVE and check permissions to make sure the shortcut is still executable. Obviously if it is not executable - make it so!
In General, click the icon button and choose a suitable icon.


the options --loop and --random should be pretty obvious.  If you don't want the desktop to continue playing delete --loop.  If you want the playlist to play in order, delete --random.

Now when you click your new icon in the panel, if all goes well, you'll get a full screen wallpaper of whatever is in your Music-Videos folder. And of course you point the icon to whatever folder you want to use. NOTE There is NO forward slash before the folder name in the command.

Hope this simple trick helps KDE users looking for a really easy way to run video wallpaper.

Cheers,

RossD.

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