Ember

A lightweight, high-performance animated wallpaper engine for macOS. Built with a strict focus on system efficiency, run stunning video wallpapers without draining your battery or hogging resources.

Overview

Ember uses exclusively hardware-accelerated video playback and smart power-saving features to keep your Mac fast and responsive while displaying animated wallpapers.

Features

• Hardware-Accelerated Playback, AVPlayer and AVPlayerLayer for seamless .mp4 video looping
• True Desktop Integration, renders behind Finder icons, spans the full screen, supports multi-monitor setups
• Smart Power Management, automatically pauses playback when:
  • Mac switches to battery power
  • A fullscreen app is detected
  • The screen is locked or the display sleeps
• Wallpaper Manager, scans ~/Movies/AnimatedWallpapers, generates thumbnails, and caches metadata
• Minimal UI, clean SwiftUI interface for browsing, preveiwing, and applying wallpapers
• Low Resource Footprint, under ~100MB RAM, shared AVPlayer instances, limited redraws. No WebViews or manual frame rendering.

Resource Usage

PID     USER        PRI  NI   VIRT    RES     S   CPU%  MEM%   TIME+     COMMAND
56398   imranwafa   17   0    415G    68416   S   0.1   0.2    0:00.24   /Users/imranwafa/Documents/Projects/Ember/build/Ember.app/Contents/MacOS/Ember

^^^ Tested on an Apple M3 with 32 GB RAM. During normal use, average memory usage was ~22.3 MB with roughly 15 active threads.

Tech Stack

• Swift
• SwiftUI, UI rendering
• AppKit, window and screen management
• AVFoundation, hardware-accelerated video playback

Architecturea

Ember
 ├── Engine/
 │   ├── WallpaperEngine.swift
 │   ├── ScreenManager.swift
 │   └── WallpaperWindow.swift
 ├── Models/
 │   ├── Wallpaper.swift
 │   └── AppSettings.swift
 ├── Services/
 │   ├── WallpaperLoader.swift
 │   ├── ThumbnailGenerator.swift
 │   ├── ActivityMonitor.swift
 │   └── PowerMonitor.swift
 ├── Views/
 │   ├── WallpaperGrid.swift
 │   ├── PreviewPlayer.swift
 │   ├── SettingsView.swift
 │   └── MenuBarView.swift
 └── EmberApp.swift

Requirements

• macOS 13.0 or later
• Xcode 15.0 or later (for building)

Build

Xcode

1. Open Ember.xcodeproj or Package.swift in Xcode.
2. Select your Mac as the run destination.
3. Press Cmd + R to build and run.

Command Line

xcodebuild -project Ember.xcodeproj -scheme Ember -configuration Release build

Or use the provided build script:

./build.sh

Usage

1. Launch Ember.
2. The app creates a folder at ~/Movies/AnimatedWallpapers on first run.
3. Drop .mp4 looping videos into that folder.
4. Use the Ember UI to select and apply a wallpaper.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

MIT License, see LICENSE for details.