Tired of your static desktop wallpapers? With the open source tool Lively it is possible to use animated backgrounds such as videos or gifs. If you select simple, tasteful animations, such a video wallpaper will quickly look attractive.
Lively
price
Free (without advertising)
Language
English
OS
Windows
Website
https://rocksdanister.github.io/lively
6 Score 60 
- Pros
- The simplicity of adding animated content
- The setting options
- Negatives
- Naturally uses RAM and CPU, so only if your PC is powerful enough
Most users start with the classic blue Windows wallpaper and then quickly switch to beautiful background photos. After all, the desktop is your digital workplace and you want to give it a personal touch.
With the free Lively, you go one step further. This allows you to use animated backgrounds such as animated gifs, videos and even animated web pages as background.
Drizzle or driving rain
Lively is an ad-free project that you can download as a desktop application and a portable app. The result is a dashboard consisting of four tabs: Library, Type, Settings and About. There are already 10 films in the library.
You make a choice and then click on the button Set as Wallpaper. For example, if you choose ‘Calm Leaves’, the desktop changes to a background of foliage with an occasional drop of rain. Some backgrounds have the label Customizable; that means you can still adjust the appearance. In the background ‘Rain’ you control the speed, intensity, brightness and zoom range of the rain.
Even web pages
In the tab Settings you can specify when Lively should pause playing the background video. For example when you put a window of an application in full-screen. That way you save on CPU load. You can add new background material via drag-and-drop.
Lively supports mp4, webm, mov, as well as gifs. We could even load animated home pages of websites as a background. In the Library is also a button that takes you to even more animated wallpapers on Reddit.
Conclusion
Love it, or hate it. Users who swear by a desktop that is as neutral as possible will hate this solution, but those who like to bring the background wallpaper to life will love this free and easy-to-use software. If you select the correct and by that we mean ‘quiet’ cinematic backgrounds, this is an interesting tool to pimp up your desktop.
.