Fantascene

Version: 1.6.1 Web: https://github.com/ dependon/fantascene-dynamic-wallpaper

We won’t hold our breath for mainstream distros to offer video wallpapers. It’s just a novelty but, boy, do these look good! So, if you run Linux on a modern machine with a multicore processor, oodles of RAM, and dedicated graphics hardware, take Fantascene for a spin.

The project releases through Open Build Service (OBS) and offers binaries for various releases of Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. You can either download the binaries for your distro directly or by adding their repo. The project’s OBS page linked on its website offers step-by-step instructions for adding the relevant repo and installing the app for every supported release of the four distros mentioned above.

The app has a simple user interface. You simply point it to a video and hit Play. The app then replaces your current wallpaper with the video. If the video has an audio track, you can also adjust its volume from Fantascene’s interface.

Fantascene ships with a sample video of dolphins to give you a feel for the app and experiment with its settings. Use the File button on top to point the video to any MP4 file. Whenever you point the app to a new wallpaper, press Set New to activate it. There’s also a self-explanatory Pause button.

The Hide button hides the app’s interface, however, instead of taking down the video wallpaper as you might assume. In fact, there’s no apparent option to restore the old static wallpaper. After some fiddling around, selecting Manual from the Model pull-down menu took down the video wallpaper, but we aren’t sure if that’s the correct way to go about it.

The app displays desktop icons by default but you can override that behaviour from its advanced settings, from where you can also tweak the video FPS, and more.