Want to add a little motion to your desktop? The web is full of animations — explosions, patterns, loops, scenes, and basically anything you can imagine to break the monotony of static images. There are many apps that can turn your wallpaper into an animated one, but if you prefer something simple, portable, and free, AutoWall will be more than enough.
A quick visit to YouTube (and other streaming platforms) will confirm that many users have desktops full of color and motion. One of the most popular applications for this is Wallpaper Engine, available through Steam. It works quite well, many of its wallpapers are excellent, and developers often release updates… but it's not free: at the time of writing, its license costs four euros (in other regions, the price is lower).
So, is there a free alternative? Fortunately, the answer is yes, and although it doesn't have the advanced features of Wallpaper Engine, all we want is an option to put a GIF or video as a wallpaper. The AutoWall project by Spanish developer 'SegoCode' does that perfectly, offering support for animated GIFs and MP4 videos (not to mention more than a dozen additional formats), and as if that weren't enough, it's portable and open source.
How to Turn a GIF or Video into Your Wallpaper with AutoWall
The program has no advanced menu, beyond setting it to start with the operating system or choosing the monitor for playback (multi-monitor mode is still in beta). All you have to do is locate the video with the Browse button (you can also place a copy inside the 'VideosHere' subfolder), or edit the playlist.edl file to play more than one. Technically, AutoWall is a reinterpretation of a similar project called Weebp, which hasn't received updates since November 2018. Video playback is handled by mpv (AutoWall includes the .exe in one of its folders), and resource usage is reasonable, but I recommend keeping a close eye on those numbers on more modest systems.
Finally, where can we get animated GIFs and videos? Honestly, the sky is the limit. Many image banks on the web have sections dedicated to video, and personally, I would try to find material that matches the native resolution of your desktop. As for the possibility of using Wallpaper Engine wallpapers in AutoWall, it's possible as long as it's an MP4 video and not a PKG-format wallpaper. Link below!
Official site and download: Click here
How to download programs from GitHub: Click here
