Livewall is a simple bash script to let you display videos from YouTube or your own computer as live wallpapers on Mac OS X.
It operates from the command line, because GUIs are hard.
To use it, you need to have VLC installed. For YouTube support, you need youtube-dl. (We don't actually download Youtube videos, we just use it to get a streaming URL we can pass to VLC).
You need to put livewall somewhere in your PATH. Perhaps like this:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgentle/livewall/master/livewall -o /usr/local/bin/livewall
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/livewall
Depending on your /usr/local/bin permissions, you might need to put sudo in
front of those.
You also probably want to look at the source before you run it. You don't know me very well, and maybe I'm trying to steal your passwords or replace every video on your hard drive with Rick Astley. Seriously, the source is only 8 lines long.
Just type this
livewall ~/Downloads/mycoolvideo.mp4
Or this:
livewall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUgrBTNbSe4
You can also specify a quality like this:
livewall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUgrBTNbSe4 [height=720]
By default, it uses the quality bestvideo, which means no audio for Youtube's
1080p+ streams. If you want the highest quality stream with audio (usually
720p), you can use best as the quality.
I have a list of neat places to look for Youtube nature videos on my website.