Setting your desktop background to an animated video is one of those things that seems really cool at first thought, but the practical implementations—including an official version from Microsoft back in the Vista days—always leave me cold. Still, PCs are a lot more powerful than they used to be, and it looks like Windows 11 is giving it another go with the latest Insider builds.
Social media user PhantomOfEarth is a frequent digger-upper of new Windows features, and they spotted this in the latest developer and beta builds for Windows 11. You can apparently now set MP4 video files and other frequently-used formats as your desktop background and they’ll animate with surprising smoothness.
It won’t just show up on the Insider build, though. You need to enable feature ID 57645315 and restart explorer.exe. But once that’s done, it appears to be ready to rock in the Personalization menu.
As PhantomOfEarth notes, this is essentially reviving the “DreamScene” feature from Windows Vista, one of the many visual enhancements that Microsoft was quick to highlight way back in 2007. (Stay to the end of the commercial below to see it—and to feel really old about remembering when “burn disc” was a cool new feature for an OS.)
Of course, DreamScene didn’t really work out that well back then. Video performance was choppy at best, and it had a high system overhead for a purely aesthetic enhancement. The slowdown of the user interface to add visual flair was one of the many reasons Vista isn’t remembered as fondly as XP before it and Windows 8 after.
There have been plenty of third-party options for video wallpapers going back even further, and you can still implement the feature right now if you want to using tools like Wallpaper Engine. Meanwhile, macOS offers animated wallpapers, ditto for mobile platforms, so it’s more than possible without debilitating slowdown on modern hardware.
That said, I don’t know how much I’d bet on this feature making its way to the release version of Windows 11 in the near future. Since it still needs to be manually enabled even in Insider, Microsoft isn’t making a splash about it yet, and these sorts of low-impact additions that are prone to bugs or usability compromises tend to get the chop on a regular basis.
Still, if it arrives on my desktop, I know the first video I’ll use.