GNOME Wallpaper Engine

GNOME Wallpaper Engine is a lightweight, GPU-accelerated dynamic wallpaper solution for Linux. It uses GStreamer for video playback and GTK3 to automatically detect your desktop's workarea and scale the video to perfectly fit your screen—giving you a full-featured animated wallpaper experience similar to Wallpaper Engine.

Features

• Dynamic Video Wallpaper: Set a video as your desktop wallpaper.
• Automatic Scaling: Detects your monitor's workarea and scales the video to fill your screen.
• GPU-Accelerated: Leverages GStreamer for efficient, hardware-accelerated playback.
• Lightweight: Designed to have minimal impact on system resources.
• Wayland Support: Yes!! You have heard that right XD, this is the first time finally adding Wayland support. However... there's no multi-monitor support as it only works for a single monitor for now.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, ensure you have the following installed:

• Python 3.x
• GStreamer 1.0 (and necessary plugins, e.g., gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, etc.)
• GTK 3
• Wayland development libraries (only needed for Wayland users)

For Ubuntu/Debian systems, you can install the required packages with:

sudo apt install python3-gi python3-gst-1.0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-1.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 wayland-protocols libwayland-dev

Installation

For Wayland Users:

If you're using Wayland, you need to compile the Wayland stub before running the script:

gcc main.c -o main $(pkg-config --cflags --libs wayland-client)
gcc wayland_stub.c -o wayland_stub $(pkg-config --cflags --libs wayland-client)
gcc -c wayland_support.c $(pkg-config --cflags wayland-client)

Then, make the script executable and run it:

chmod +x wallpaper.py
./wallpaper.py

Alternatively, you can set it up to start automatically using a .desktop file (see below).

For X11 Users:

No additional compilation is needed. Just make the script executable:

chmod +x wallpaper.py

Then run:

./wallpaper.py

Usage

1. Place your video file:

   Make sure you have your video file at ~/Videos/wallpaper.mp4. You can change this path in the script if needed.

2. Run the script:

   ./wallpaper.py

3. Auto-Start on Login:

   To run the wallpaper automatically on startup, copy the provided desktop entry (or create one) to your autostart directory:

   mkdir ~/.config/autostart/ && nano video-wallpaper.desktop && cp video-wallpaper.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

   Example video-wallpaper.desktop content:

   [Desktop Entry]
   Type=Application
   Name=Video Wallpaper
   Comment=Sets a video as the desktop wallpaper on startup
   Exec=/full/path/to/gnome-wallpaper-engine/wallpaper.py
   X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
   Terminal=false

Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome! Please feel free to check out the issues page or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

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Enjoy a dynamic, animated wallpaper on your GNOME desktop!