Lively

Video wallpapers for your Mac.

Lively is a small menu bar app. It plays looping video behind your desktop icons. Each display and each Space can have its own clip. No Dock icon. No account. No cloud.

Install

1. Download the latest DMG or zip from Releases.
2. Drag Lively.app into Applications.
3. Open Lively. Look for it in the menu bar (top right).

If macOS blocks the app

Lively is signed for local use, not notarized by Apple. After install, run once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Lively.app

Or right-click Lively.app → Open → confirm.

Homebrew

brew tap harshabala/lively https://github.com/harshabala/Lively
brew install --cask lively

How to use

1. Click the menu bar icon.
2. On Displays, pick a display card.
3. Drop an MP4, MOV, or M4V on the zone (or click to browse).
4. Only H.264 and HEVC work. Other codecs, and damaged or incomplete files, are rejected with a clear error (on display cards and in the Library).

Modes

• Wallpaper — one video for that Space
• Light & Dark — different videos for light and dark appearance

Library

Save videos once. Apply them to one display or all displays.

Settings

• Launch at login
• Pause on battery
• Playback quality and loop
• Appearance (light / dark / system)
• Reset data
• Logs and About (includes first-launch help)

Pause and resume all wallpapers from the top of the window.

Lively also stops decoding on its own when nobody can see the video: while the displays or the Mac sleep, the screen is locked, the screen saver runs, you switch to another user, or a display's wallpaper is fully covered by a full-screen or maximised window. It resumes automatically.

If a video goes missing (moved, deleted, or on an ejected drive), that display shows your normal macOS wallpaper and the card offers Reselect. Moved or renamed files are usually followed automatically; a re-inserted drive is picked up when it mounts.

What it is

Platform	macOS 14+
Stack	Native Swift. No third-party libraries.
Privacy	Offline by default. Optional GitHub update check only if you turn it on.
License	MIT

Limits

• Codecs: H.264 and HEVC only
• Files: .mp4, .mov, .m4v
• Not App Store: needs desktop-layer access the sandbox does not allow
• Not notarized: clear quarantine once after download (see Install)
• Spaces are told apart by their macOS desktop picture. Two Spaces on the same display with the same desktop picture share one clip.
• No playlists or schedules yet
• Updates: banner can open Releases; no auto-install

Build from source

./package.sh
open /private/tmp/LivelyOutput/Lively.app

DMG with drag-to-Applications:

./scripts/make-dmg.sh

Needs Xcode or Command Line Tools.

Develop and test

Lively is a Swift package (LivelyCore library, LivelyApp executable, LivelyTests).

swift build      # debug build
swift test       # unit tests (CI runs the same on macOS 15 / Xcode 26.3)

With Command Line Tools only (no Xcode), use ./test.sh. ./scripts/check_hygiene.sh runs repo checks. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Release packaging lives in scripts/release.sh (--dry-run builds without publishing); scripts/smoke_verify.sh smoke-checks a built app.

Privacy

Assignments stay on your Mac. Security-scoped bookmarks remember the files you chose. No analytics. Lively makes no network requests unless you turn on Check for Updates (off by default), which asks the GitHub Releases API for the latest version at launch. Note: Lively is not sandboxed (it has to draw below the desktop icons), so this is a promise kept by the code rather than enforced by an entitlement.

Full policy: PRIVACY.md. Problems? Settings > Logs > Download Logs creates a redacted report (no file paths) you can attach to an issue.

More documentation

ARCHITECTURE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, docs/RELEASING.md, docs/SANDBOX_READINESS.md, docs/PERFORMANCE.md, docs/PRODUCTION_READINESS.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.