Last updated: August 27, 2023
If you are a gamer, you necessarily have a personalized wallpaper. And the latest fad among gamers is animated background looping videos. But be careful what hardware you install this software on.
As this is a software that broadcasts an animated wallpaper continuously, the resources of the processor and the graphics card will be constantly strained. Which will decrease the battery life; therefore not recommended for laptops, tablets and other smartphones.
Under Windows 10, WallpaperEngine is the most popular software for this type of customization. It is edited by Steam and costs less than € 4.
In order to run Wallpaper Engine, you need to install the Steam application store. It can be downloaded at this address: https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/.
Wallpaper Engine interface
The Wallpaper Engine interface is made up of three different categories.
- Installed: this category contains all the wallpapers that you will have installed from the workshop.
- Discover: here you will find new live wallpapers every day that might interest you.
- Workshop: this is a place where Internet users can share their creations.
Installing live wallpaper Windows 10
For install a new live wallpaper under Windows 10, you have to go to the "Discover" tab of the user interface. We then have access to different directories classified by theme and which revolve a lot around video games (characters, sets or recorded games).
Then, you just have to click on "download" and it will apply automatically.
Creating your own live wallpaper
The success of Wallpaper Engine is to have included in the software interface an option that allows you to assemble your own animated wallpapers from photos, 2D animation, 3D animation, videos.
Available from the "Workshop" then "Wallpaper editor" tab, Steam has endowed Wallpaper Engine with a rich set of tools allowing the creation of a truly personal animated wallpaper.
The creation of an animated wallpaper is possible from images, videos, templates provided by the software and includes a large number of transitions.
Sharing your live wallpaper
If you are rather proud of your live wallpapers, or want to grab somebody else's live wallpaper from the Steam community, it couldn't be simpler. Go to the “Workshop” tab of Wallpaper Engine.
The settings of Wallpaper Engine
As we have seen above, this display software for animated background is particularly resource intensive. On the other hand, there are many situations where displaying live wallpapers is not absolutely necessary.
For example every time you use the full screen mode of your computer, whether for work, play or entertainment. There are therefore many parameters allowing to automatically pause live wallpaper in circumstances where its execution is irrelevant or would become problematic, for example:
- when the laptop is on battery;
- when launching certain applications;
- when a foreground application uses full screen mode;
Steam also plans to adapt the live wallpaper to the hardware resources of the computer.
Wallpaper Engine supports multiscreen environments. It is possible to reduce the display quality of the animated wallpaper, decrease the number of fps of the animated wallpaper, cut the audio output of the animated wallpaper etc.