With VLC Media Player Set Videos As Your Desktop Wallpaper

Are you board of looking at your desktop wallpapers which are always a still image and don’t have any kind of movement or animation and not at all look entertaining at some point of time?

So to make it entertaining and animated you can put videos and movies as your desktop wallpaper. No I am not joking, some of you might know about it, as there is a hidden feature in VLC Media Player from long time by which we can set videos as desktop background wallpaper. So if you want to know how then follow these steps:

  1. Open VLC media player in your computer
  2. From top menu bar select Tools –> Preferences –> Video
  3. VLC - Tools -- Preferences

  4. Now in Output drop-down from Default change it to DirectX (DirectDraw) video output, then press Save button (make sure you have DirectX installed in your computer, in most case it should be installed)
  5. VLC – Video -- Output -- DirectX (DirectDraw) video output

  6. Then close VLC player and again run it and play any video you want in it
  7. Then right-click on video screen and select Video –> Set as Wallpaper
  8. VLC - Video -- Set as Wallpaper

Now your video will become your desktop wallpaper and it will work as normal wallpaper but it will be moving, just one thing you need to know that once you (right-click and) refreshed your desktop then video will get disappear and you are back to your old wallpaper. After you set video output to DirectX and restart VLC Player you will see if you use Windows Vista or 7 then Aero feature will get disable temporarily (till VLC is running in DirectX output mode).

Instead of changing the video output and directly try (step 5) to set video as wallpaper then also it will get added but icons will not be visible and when you do right-click instead of showing default right-click menu it will show right-click menu of VLC Media Player. Basically your VLC media player will get into full screen mode with your taskbar on top.