LiveWall - A live wallpaper that costs nothing when you aren't looking

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Live video wallpapers that don't drain your laptop. When a window covers the desktop, LiveWall tears the decoder down entirely: not paused, destroyed. Native on macOS, Windows, Linux and Android. 504 KB binary, 12 MB idle, menu bar only. Free and open source (MIT).

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Hey Product Hunt 👋 I built LiveWall because every live wallpaper app I tried showed up in Activity Monitor and spun my laptop fans, decoding video nobody could see behind my editor. So LiveWall is built around one constraint: it should cost almost nothing when you aren't looking at it. • Visibility tears down, it doesn't pause. Cover the desktop and the decoder is destroyed. The last frame stays on screen for free; playback resumes where it left off. • Partial coverage counts. It measures how much of the desktop is actually visible (64×40 grid) and stops below 8%, so one visible corner doesn't keep a 4K decode running. • One frame in flight. No read-ahead queue, no buffering a second of 4K into memory. • Low Power, thermal, lock screen and idle are all hard stops. It's native on every platform: Swift + Metal on Mac, C++/Direct3D 11 on Windows, X11 + Wayland on Linux, and a 102 KB APK on Android. No Electron, no web view. The website has a live demo: drag a window over the wallpaper and watch the decoder shut off. Mac tip: first launch, right-click LiveWall › Open (it isn't notarized yet). Free and MIT-licensed. I'd love feedback, especially numbers from your machine.

hey swalahu, congrats on livewall! we're launching benson today too: . hope the launch goes well.