A simple X11+SDL2 animated wallpaper setter and video player
Anipaper (ANImated Wallpaper) is a simple 'wallpaper setter' for X11 environments that use the root window to display videos in a loop.
Built on top of the FFmpeg libraries (libavcodec and companions),
Anipaper paper strives to be as simple as possible, having only the basics,
thus ensuring a readable and highly modifiable source code. Furthermore,
since it uses SDL2, it has a good performance without consuming all system
resources, depending on the type of video to be played.
anipaper.mp4
Anipaper demo, click to open on YouTube
Background video by Qika Nugroho from Pixabay
Anipaper tries to be as simple as possible, so it doesn't try to be an all-in-one solution or anything like that. However, there are some options on how the video should be displayed, and also a window mode (-w), which makes it behave like any other video player (no audio).
Its options/command-line arguments are as follows:
Usage: anipaper <input-file>
-o Execute only once, without loop (loop enabled by default)
-w Enable windowed mode (do not set wallpaper)
-b Enable borderless windowed mode (do not set wallpaper)
Resolution options:
-k (Keep) resolution, may appears smaller or bigger than the screen, preserve
aspect ratio
-s (Scale to) screen resolution, occupies the entire screen regardless of the
aspect ratio!
-f (Fit) to screen. Make the video fit into the screen (default)
-r Set screen resolution, in format: WIDTHxHEIGHT
-d <dev> Enable HW accel for a given device (like vaapi or vdpau)
-p Enable pause/resume commands via SIGUSR1
-h This help
Note:
Please note that some options depends on the screen resolution. If I'm unable
to get the resolution and the -r parameter is not set:
- If X11 (wallpaper) mode: The video will always fill the screen area
- If Windowed mode: Window will be the same size as the video
Here are a series of executions on an i5 7300HQ (integrated video), with different resolutions, FPS and with and without hardware acceleration for this video:
| Resolution | HW Accel | FPS | CPU Usage (%): | GPU Usage (%): | Time (User/Sys/Elapsed): |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2560x1440 | NO | 60 | 65.5% | 31.43% | 10.38s, 0.43s, 16.51s |
| 2560x1440 | YES | 60 | 32.76% | 36.96% | 4.67s, 0.72s, 16.48s |
| 2560x1440 | NO | 30 | 35.76% | 15.43% | 5.69s, 0.23s, 16.61s |
| 2560x1440 | YES | 30 | 16.56% | 18.26% | 2.31s, 0.41s, 16.50s |
| Resolution | HW Accel | FPS | CPU Usage (%): | GPU Usage (%): | Time (User/Sys/Elapsed): |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1920x1080 | NO | 60 | 40.46% | 30.06% | 6.4s, 0.31s, 16.58s |
| 1920x1080 | YES | 60 | 21.26% | 31.36% | 2.89s, 0.60s, 16.47s |
| 1920x1080 | NO | 30 | 23.05% | 15.13% | 3.59s, 0.19s, 16.49s |
| 1920x1080 | YES | 30 | 10.76% | 15.36% | 1.46s, 0.31s, 16.49s |
| Resolution | HW Accel | FPS | CPU Usage (%): | GPU Usage (%): | Time (User/Sys/Elapsed): |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1280x720 | NO | 60 | 24% | 29.13% | 3.72s, 0.25s, 16.58s |
| 1280x720 | YES | 60 | 15.06% | 25.56% | 1.93s, 0.53s, 16.47s |
| 1280x720 | NO | 30 | 13.36% | 14.5% | 2.04s, 0.15s, 16.48s |
| 1280x720 | YES | 30 | 8.16% | 12.86% | 1.07s, 0.26s, 16.48s |
It can be observed that CPU usage decreases dramatically as resolution and FPS decrease. Also note
that using hardware acceleration (-d parameter) halves CPU usage, so its use is highly recommended.
Note 1: For each resolution/fps pair, the tests were repeated three times and the average was
obtained. These tests can be run with bench/bench.sh)
Note 2: Please note that the CPU time reported by intel_gpu_time is the CPU time of all cores.
As Anipaper's actual CPU usage is generally distributed evenly across the cores/threads, the
consumption of each core is more-or-less /num_cores, i.e: 8% usage means approximately 2%
per core on a quadcore system.
Note 3: All results obtained above were executed without pauses. Executions with pauses are expected to have much lower total CPU usage. (more on that below)
To further decrease CPU usage, Anipaper has a 'pause' mode: whenever the total area of visible windows (considering possible overlap) is greater than a configurable threshold (default 70%) the video playback pauses. This means that Anipaper will pause whenever a program is full screen or even if there are too many windows covering enough of the wallpaper.
Considering a 'normal' usage where most windows occupy the entire screen (or most of it), Anipaper would run as little time as possible, and would not take over of the CPU.
Incompatibility with compositors. Since compositors use X11's root window to manage other windows, feature used by Anipaper. It is also clear that there is no Wayland compatibility.
If you don't use a compositor, nothing to be done here, should work out of the box.
Disable compositor and any other programs that can write in the X11 root window:
Close xfdesktop and disable compositing:
$ xfdesktop -Q
$ xfconf-query --channel xfwm4 --property /general/use_compositing --type bool --set falseThere is only two dependencies: SDL2 and FFmpeg libraries (libavcodec, libavformat,
among others).
However, it is worth noting that due to constant API change between major
versions of FFmpeg, it is recommended to use libavcodec version 59 (also successfully
tested on 58). If you want to be more accurate, use the following commit hash:
3a9861e22c636d843c10e23f5585196d1f3400dd.
A typical build on Ubuntu 18.04.5 would look something like:
# Install SDL2
$ sudo apt install libsdl2-dev
# Install FFmpeg's libraries (nasm and pkg-config are FFmpeg build dependencies):
$ sudo apt install pkg-config nasm
$ wget https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/archive/3a9861e22c636d843c10e23f5585196d1f3400dd.zip
$ unzip -q FFmpeg-3a9*.zip
$ rm FFmpeg-3a9*.zip
$ cd FFmpeg-3a9*/
$ ./configure
$ make -j$(nproc)
$ sudo make install$ make
# Optionally (if you want to install):
$ make install # (PREFIX and DESTDIR allowed here, defaults to /usr/local/)Anipaper's pause support allows two types of customization: screen area (default 70%),
and window check interval (100ms). Both can be configured via SCREEN_AREA_THRESHOLD
and CHECK_PAUSE_MS macros:
# Set screen area threshold to 90%
CFLAGS="-DSCREEN_AREA_THRESHOLD=90" make
# Set window area polling to 200ms
CFLAGS="-DCHECK_PAUSE_MS=200" make
# Set both
CFLAGS="-DSCREEN_AREA_THRESHOLD=90 -DCHECK_PAUSE_MS=200" makeor via anipaper.h.
Anipaper is always open to the community and willing to accept contributions, whether with issues, documentation, testing, new features, bugfixes, typos, and etc. Welcome aboard.
Anipaper is licensed under MIT License. Written by Davidson Francis and (hopefully) other contributors.