Get Video Wallpapers on Mac & Add Your Own Videos to Screen Savers with Phosphene
If you’ve ever wanted live video wallpapers on your Mac, the Phosphene app will bring your MacOS desktop to life. But that’s not all, Phosphene is also able to add your own videos to the native wallpaper and screen saver pipeline on the Mac, letting MacOS play your own videos on both your desktop, and your Mac lock screen.
Phosphene is a neat and straightforward app that allows you to select any of your own personal videos alongside the default Aerial wallpaper collection. You can then choose to have them behave just like the native Aerial screen savers where they are live and active in screen saver mode and the lock screen, or you can have them playback on the desktop too. It’s fairly resource efficient, and in testing it was never particularly aggressive with CPU or memory running a 4K sample video as a live wallpaper, so if you’re interested in that effect, or just to customize your screen savers and lock screen with your own videos, Phosphene is a fantastic app for your Mac.
- Grab Phosphene from Github here (free, open source)
- Get Phosphene from the developer homepage here
Once you download the DMG and drag the Phosphene app into your /Applications folder, running it will create a menu bar item, or you can interact with it through the app directly.
You will also find new “Phosphene” options in the standard System Settings > Wallpaper and System Settings > Wallpaper > Screen Saver areas on your Mac, and you’ll want to select those if you wish to use them as either your wallpaper, or screen saver.
Simply choose your own videos (for best results that are most Aerial default quality, use 4k and 5k videos. If you’d like to find some nice high res free videos to download, try Pexels or Pixabay for free HD stock videos of all sorts) in Phosphene, and enjoy your own highly customized video lock screen, screen saver, or live wallpaper experience.
The screenshots here demonstrate Phosphene in use with a 4k video from an aquarium, downloaded from one of the aforementioned free 4k video sites. And while this is just a screenshot so you can’t tell, this is a video playing on the lock screen, and the video remains playing on the desktop wallpaper as well.
Note that Phosphene does not need to be running to keep the wallpaper and screen saver effect after you have configured it.
Anyway, this is a pretty neat app, and offers a really nice way to customize your Mac desktop wallpaper, as well as screen saver, so check it out if that appeals to you.
