Frequently asked.

From the download page. Open the zip (Safari may automatically do it for you), drag Aerial.app into /Applications and open it from there. A short setup assistant asks how you want to use it, then look for the Aerial icon in your menu bar (or in the dock, if you picked that mode). Updates arrive on their own through Sparkle, you can disable auto-updates in Settings if you prefer to install them manually.

None. Aerial no longer needs Full Disk Access: its data lives in /Users/Shared/Aerial/, which any app can read and write.

You may see three optional prompts:

• Location Services, if you want Aerial to find your position for sunrise and sunset times and for the weather overlay. You can also type a location by hand in Settings › Time, and a city in the weather overlay’s settings.
• Access to the macOS wallpaper cache folder, once, when Aerial offers to keep that cache from growing (see the Wallpaper section below).
• Access to your old Aerial 3 folder, if the setup assistant finds videos from Aerial 3 and offers to move them.

Aerial can start at login; that’s configured in Settings › Advanced. It uses Apple’s current login-item API, so there’s nothing to clean up in your LaunchAgents folder, and if an older version left a file there, Aerial will remove it.

Aerial tells you when it isn’t set: the menu bar popover shows a blue bar with a button that sets it, and the home screen of the Video Library has Set as screensaver and Set as wallpaper buttons. I recommend those over System Settings, because they enable Aerial on every display and every Space at once.

You can also do it by hand in System Settings › Screen Saver or System Settings › Wallpaper. Aerial 4 appears in its own category by the same name.

Your downloaded videos. On first launch the setup assistant looks for Aerial 3’s data and offers to move the video cache into Aerial 4’s folder, including a custom cache location if you had set one. On macOS 27 you may be asked to grant access to the old folder first, and if the move fails, Aerial offers it again later so you can at least reclaim the space.

Settings, overlays and sources start fresh, because the screensaver, the settings file and the overlay system are all new in Aerial 4. The assistant gets you going with an overlay preset (Modern or Classic) and your choice of wallpaper mode, and everything can be changed later in Settings.

Aerial 4 no longer ships as a .saver bundle. The screensaver and the wallpaper are one macOS extension (an .appex) bundled inside Aerial.app, the same mechanism Apple uses for its own wallpapers and screensavers. Apple has never documented it for third parties, so Aerial relies on private APIs to do it, and as far as I know it’s the first third-party screensaver that does.

What it gets you:

• Compatibility. No more random black screens, no stacked screensaver instances after wake, and a long list of bugs that piled up against the legacy .saver host over the years simply doesn’t apply any more.
• Isolation. Aerial runs in its own process and sandbox, not inside Apple’s shared legacy screensaver host next to every other .saver you have installed.
• A real wallpaper. The same extension plays as your desktop and on the lock screen, which no .saver can do.

It took a rewrite from Aerial 3 to get there. If you’d like to build your own extension-based screensaver, I put together a minimal sample project at AerialScreensaver/AppexSaverMinimal to get you started.

The wallpaper is optional: the screensaver works fine without it. The setup assistant asks about it on first launch. Whether you use dock mode or menu bar mode, you will find a Set as wallpaper button in the menu or on the Video Library’s home screen. You can also manually enable it in System Settings › Wallpaper. You do not have to use it on all your monitors simultaneously if you don’t want to.

Once Aerial is your wallpaper:

• The Wallpaper button at the top of the menu serves as a pause/play button to switch between still (a frozen frame) and live (the video plays).
• The playlist below it shows what’s playing. Click any other entry to jump to it, or use the next and previous buttons and the speed slider.
• Settings › Wallpaper holds all the advanced configuration: Auto-Pause, Auto-Advance, and the battery, thermal, Low Power Mode and camera pauses.

To stop using it, pick any other wallpaper in System Settings › Wallpaper.

Aerial plays whatever the current filter says. The quickest way to change it is the filter row in the menu bar popover, just under the mode cards: pick a category (an expansion, a location, a scene, a time of day, your own videos or a playlist) and refine it with the chevron on the right when there are sub-options.

For more choice, open the Video Library from the popover’s bottom bar. That’s where you install expansions, import your own videos and build playlists, and every source, location, favourite, expansion and playlist there has a Play button that makes it the current selection, on every display or just one.

First, if Aerial is your wallpaper or screensaver, pick another one in System Settings › Wallpaper and System Settings › Screen Saver. Then drag Aerial.app from /Applications to the Trash.

To remove the downloaded videos and settings as well, delete /Users/Shared/Aerial/. The only other trace is a small preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences. Homebrew users can do all of it with brew uninstall --zap aerial.

Yes. The screensaver and the wallpaper are a macOS extension bundled inside Aerial.app, and macOS runs it whether the app is open or not. Quitting the menu bar app stops neither of them.

What you do lose while the app is closed is everything it does on their behalf: pausing when windows cover the wallpaper (and the battery, thermal, Low Power Mode and camera pauses), Auto-Advance, global hotkeys, new video downloads, the data behind the weather and music overlays, and live feeds. So the usual setup is to leave it running in the menu bar. You can have Aerial in your dock instead if you don’t want to pollute your menu bar, pick the option in Settings › Advanced.

No. Aerial is macOS only. tvOS doesn’t allow third-party screensavers.

No, and I have no plans to port it. Projects inspired by Aerial exist for other platforms, but none of them are related to this one and I don’t vouch for them. If you want Apple’s aerials on another OS, search for a community project made for that platform.

Aerial 4.1 requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later, and runs on macOS 27 (Golden Gate) as well. Apple Silicon and Intel Macs are both supported.

On macOS 15 (Sequoia), use Aerial 4.0.16 from the download page. It’s the last release of the 4.0 line, it won’t be offered 4.1 as an update, and the Homebrew cask picks it for you automatically on Sequoia. For older macOS versions, Aerial 3 builds are still available but are no longer maintained.

Stick with the default on Apple Silicon Macs (M1+). Aerial uses 4K SDR at 240 fps as the default to provide the best experience as a live wallpaper where it slows down the frame rate.

Decoding is fully hardware accelerated, so the high frame rate has no impact. The only exception is with older Intel Macs: if you see stutter or heat there, switch to 4K HEVC or one of the 1080p formats in Settings › Advanced.

Yes. Open the Video Library (the third button in the popover’s bottom bar) and look for My Videos in the sidebar: drop your videos there. Or copy your .mov and .mp4 files into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/ and Aerial picks them up on its own. Either way, you can then edit the title, location, scene and time of day from that same section. Verify that they play in QuickTime before adding them. If they look less smooth than the built-in videos when the wallpaper slows down, see why.

It’s the frame rate. The aerials Aerial plays by default are 240 frames per second, and that’s what lets the live wallpaper run in slow motion (down to 1/8× speed) and ease to a stop over a few seconds when it pauses, without looking choppy. Most videos you shoot or download are 24, 30 or 60 fps. Slowed down to 1/8×, a 30 fps video only shows about 4 new frames per second, and below 60 fps Aerial stops the video almost instantly when it pauses instead of easing out, as a slow stop would step visibly from frame to frame.

You can get the same effect with your own videos by converting them to 240 fps with ffmpeg, which creates the in-between frames using motion interpolation. If you don’t have it, install it with Homebrew: brew install ffmpeg.

Using the Mac’s hardware encoder (larger files):

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -vf "minterpolate=fps=240:mi_mode=mci:mc_mode=aobmc:me_mode=bidir:vsbmc=1" \
  -c:v hevc_videotoolbox -q:v 65 -profile:v main10 -pix_fmt p010le \
  -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy \
  out_240.mp4

Using the x265 software encoder (files less than half the size, a little slower):

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -vf "minterpolate=fps=240:mi_mode=mci:mc_mode=aobmc:me_mode=bidir:vsbmc=1" \
  -c:v libx265 -crf 18 -preset slow -pix_fmt yuv420p10le \
  -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy \
  out_240.mp4

Be patient: the interpolation itself runs on a single CPU core and takes most of the time, whichever encoder you pick. On an M1 Ultra, 2 seconds of 4K took about 7 minutes with either command, so plan on a few hours per minute of 4K video. Try a short excerpt first by adding -t 10 right after -i in.mp4. Interpolated frames are an educated guess, so fast or complex motion can show some warping; slow, steady footage like drone shots converts best. Once converted, add the new file to My Videos like any other.

Yes. Open Video Library → Live Feeds, click Add Live Feed and paste the URL. For YouTube, only live streams work: regular videos and scheduled premieres don’t, and there’s no channel or playlist support.

Local camera support via direct stream URLs works the same way: HLS (.m3u8), RTSP and RTSPS, and progressive HTTP MP4 can be pasted as live feeds.

Some of these will require external command-line tools: YouTube needs yt-dlp and RTSP needs ffmpeg. The easiest way to get them is via Homebrew (brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg). Aerial will let you know the exact command when one is missing.

Note for Intel Macs: Homebrew no longer supports Intel Macs on macOS 27. Consider using MacPorts (sudo port install yt-dlp ffmpeg) instead. You can also install both tools by hand: download the macOS builds from the yt-dlp and ffmpeg sites and put them in /usr/local/bin. Aerial looks in the Homebrew, MacPorts and /usr/local/bin folders. Make sure to follow each project’s installation instructions.

A word of warning on YouTube: it breaks whenever YouTube changes something on their end, despite the yt-dlp project’s best efforts. When a stream stops working, update yt-dlp first (brew upgrade yt-dlp, sudo port selfupdate && sudo port upgrade yt-dlp, or yt-dlp -U for a manual install); fixes usually land there within hours.

Also note that the initial yt-dlp setup can be fairly involved, as YouTube support needs a few extra components, including a JavaScript runtime. Refer to their documentation.

YouTube support in Aerial is best-effort, and I can’t offer direct support for it myself.

Any camera that exposes a direct stream URL: RTSP, RTSPS, HLS (.m3u8) or progressive HTTP MP4. Paste it in Video Library → Live Feeds → Add Live Feed and you’re done. Prosumer and IP camera brands generally expose one: Reolink, Ubiquiti / UniFi Protect, Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, Foscam, TP-Link Tapo, and Aqara G2H / G3 are all known to work.

Most consumer “cloud” cameras (Ring, Nest, Arlo, Wyze, Blink, Eufy on most models) don’t expose a direct URL. The vendor’s app is the only sanctioned way to view them, and many only stream on motion or while you have the app open, not 24/7. That makes them a poor fit for a screensaver even when you can get a stream out.

Third-party bridges can sometimes expose cloud cameras as RTSP: docker-wyze-bridge for Wyze, and Home Assistant with go2rtc for Ring, Nest, Arlo and Eufy, depending on the model and the vendor’s current app. I don’t maintain or endorse any particular bridge; they tend to break when vendors push updates. Your camera’s community will know what works right now.

Aerial uses macOS hardware accelerated video decoding, similar to Quicktime. So anything that plays in QuickTime will play in Aerial. More precisely MP4 or MOV containers with H.264 or HEVC (H.265) are the best supported formats. You can drop files into Video Library → My Videos, or copy them into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/.

If a file doesn’t play (older AVI, MKV, AV1), you can transcode it. HandBrake is a user friendly option with a GUI, or ffmpeg if you prefer a command line option. H.265 with the hvc1 tag gives the best result: hardware decoding and small files. With ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v hevc_videotoolbox -b:v 8M -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4

Videos in Aerial fall into two buckets. Cacheable videos (Apple’s catalog and most expansion packs) download to disk and play from the cache: fast, smooth, and fine offline. Live feeds (YouTube live streams, cameras) play straight from the network, because they have no end and nothing to cache.

The popover marks live entries, and they need a connection while they’re on screen. If a feed stalls, Aerial retries a few times and then moves on to a cached video rather than sitting on a blank frame.

Yes. In Settings › Cache, turn on Use Custom Location for Cache and pick a folder on the drive. Aerial creates a disk image in that folder and keeps the videos inside it. That detour is what lets the wallpaper extension play them: it’s sandboxed and can’t read external volumes directly, but it can read the image once Aerial has attached it. You can keep expansion packs there too, with the option just below. When the drive isn’t plugged in, those videos simply don’t play until it comes back.

Two caveats. Network shares (SMB, a NAS) can’t hold the disk image unless the share supports full sync, the same requirement Time Machine has, and Aerial tells you when a folder won’t work. And if you come from Aerial 4.0 or Aerial 3 with videos already on an external drive, Aerial offers to convert that folder when it finds it.

The same panel has the cache size limit and a Trim Cache to Limit… button if you want space back right away.

Open Aerial → Video Library → Expansions to browse the community video packs. Each pack has its own license and only installs when you click Install. The Expansions page shows what’s in them, and the same panel of the Video Library lets you see and manage every source you have.

Settings › Overlays → Open Overlay Editor. It’s a canvas where you drag clocks, dates, weather, location names, music info, battery, timers, countdowns and messages into one of seven on-screen zones, and set the font, color, shadow and opacity of each overlay.

Two presets come with it: Modern, a large translucent clock top center with the rest in the corners, and Classic, the Aerial 3 look with clock and location stacked bottom left. Or start from a blank slate. The screensaver and the wallpaper can have different layouts, and so can each display.

Settings › Displays → Viewing mode has four options. Independent (the default) gives each display its own playlist and filter, and each pauses on its own. Cloned plays the same video on every display. Mirrored does the same but flips every other display, for a symmetrical look. Spanned stretches one video across all of them.

In Independent mode, you choose what a given display plays from its card on the Video Library’s home screen, or with the Play on menu next to any Play button in the Library. For the screensaver you can also pick which displays play at all, and what happens when external monitors are disconnected.

The current selection drives the playlist. Every source, location, favourite, expansion and playlist in the Video Library has a Play button that makes it the selection, for every display or just one, and the filter row in the popover does the same with fewer clicks. The loop / shuffle / repeat-one button above the popover’s playlist sets the order.

Time of day matters too. Built-in videos are tagged sunrise, day, sunset or night, and Aerial can optionally use your location to calculate daylight and adapt what plays at what time. It’s fully configurable.

Yes, three system-wide shortcuts let you control the wallpaper: toggle pause, previous video and next video. They work no matter which app is in front, fullscreen ones included.

You can turn them on in Settings › Accessibility → Enable global shortcuts (they’re off by default). The defaults are ⌃⌥⌘ + Space, ⌃⌥⌘ + ← and ⌃⌥⌘ + →, deliberately unusual so they don’t clash with anything else, configure them as you want.

Yes. Aerial 4 was built with VoiceOver in mind: the menu bar popover, the Video Library, Expansions, every settings panel and the setup assistant carry proper labels, and VoiceOver announces when a download finishes.

VoiceOver support is still young, and I’m sure there are rough edges I haven’t caught. If you rely on VoiceOver, please tell me what works, what’s confusing and what’s missing.

No. Aerial has no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting of any kind, and there is no Aerial server anywhere. It downloads videos straight from Apple’s servers, and fetches the update feed, the expansions catalog and video thumbnails from this site, all over HTTPS and without anything that identifies you.

Some optional features talk to other services once you turn them on: the weather overlay (OpenWeather), YouTube live feeds (yt-dlp and YouTube), the camera URLs you add yourself, and automatic location (Apple’s Location Services). Those have their own privacy policies, which I’d encourage you to read. The legal page has the full list.

When you first open Aerial, it asks what you want: No wallpaper (just the screensaver), Still wallpaper or Live wallpaper. Still works the way Apple’s own video wallpapers do once paused: a frame from the current video, refreshed when the video changes. Live plays the video, and pauses on its own when windows cover most of the desktop.

You can switch between still and live at any time from the Wallpaper card in the popover, and change the choice itself later in Settings.

Yes. Because Aerial is now a native wallpaper extension, macOS keeps it as the backdrop of the lock screen when your Mac wakes or when you lock it, exactly like the built-in wallpapers. If you want your overlays there too, there’s an option for that in Settings › Overlays.

The only time it can’t play is the login screen on a cold boot. macOS will instead show a default wallpaper.

Yes. Settings › Wallpaper lists the apps covering the wallpaper right now, and you can add them to an ignore list. You can also configure how much of the screen needs to be covered before the pause is engaged.

macOS Sonoma and Tahoe keep an uncompressed copy of every wallpaper image they’re asked to display, and never clean that cache. Aerial 4.0’s wallpaper continuity feature set a new wallpaper image many times a day, so for people who used it the cache grew by tens of gigabytes over a few weeks. The option in Settings › Storage, on by default, keeps it under 2 GB. The first time it runs, macOS asks you to grant Aerial access to that folder, once.

Aerial 4.1 no longer sets wallpaper images, since it is the wallpaper, so the cache stops growing on its own. The option stays so you can reclaim the space it took before you upgraded.

Thanks to Joshua Michaels (24 Hour Wallpaper) for surfacing the bug and for the cleanup approach I adapted.

Settings › Wallpaper → Pause when wallpaper is hidden pauses playback when windows cover most of the screen, 60% by default and adjustable. There’s no point decoding video nobody can see, so this saves GPU and CPU, and playback resumes at your chosen speed as soon as you uncover the desktop. The same panel shows which apps are covering it right now and lets you ignore the ones that shouldn’t count.

The wallpaper can also pause on battery, under thermal pressure, in Low Power Mode and while your camera is on, each with its own switch in that panel. Click the popover’s play button to override a pause for the current session.

After an update, macOS sometimes keeps the old copy of the wallpaper extension running. Aerial checks for that when it launches and restarts the wallpaper agent itself when needed, so this should be rare.

If it still happens, Settings › Wallpaper has a Restart Wallpaper Agent button under Troubleshooting, and an option to keep that button in the popover’s bottom bar. Your desktop may briefly show a default wallpaper before Aerial comes back. Restarting the Mac does the same thing.

There are two usual reasons. On older Intel Macs, decoding 4K HDR video is GPU-intensive, mostly because of the tone mapping needed to show the colors accurately. On Apple Silicon, Aerial decodes everything in hardware and the load is negligible, even at 240 fps. If you’re on Intel and notice the heat, switch to 4K HEVC or a 1080p format in Settings › Advanced.

The second reason has nothing to do with Aerial: macOS defers a lot of background work to the moment the screensaver starts. The services that tag your photo and video library are the most common culprit for fans spinning up, especially after you add a large batch of photos or right after a major macOS upgrade, when Photos rescans your whole library.