Frequently asked.

Download the latest release from the download page. Open the zip, then drag Aerial.app from your Downloads folder into /Applications and double-click it from there to launch. A setup window will guide you, then you can access settings from the icon in your menu bar. Auto-updates will be offered through Sparkle.

Unlike previous versions, Aerial 4 no longer requires Full Disk Access to function. All its data lives in /Users/Shared/Aerial/ and can be read and written without extra permissions.

The only optional permission you may see prompted is Location Services. Aerial asks for it if you want it to automatically detect your location for sunrise/sunset time calculation or for weather forecasts. It’s entirely optional — you can also specify your position manually, or set the city you want forecasts from.

Aerial can be set to launch at startup if you’d like — that’s controlled from Settings → Desktop. The new version use the latest API from Apple and will, unlike the previous version, not leave a file in your Launch Services folder. Installation will automatically remove the offending file if it exists.

Open the menu bar popover — if Aerial isn’t your active screensaver, a banner at the top has a Set as Default button that registers it in one click. We recommend using it as it will enable Aerial on all your monitors.

You can also enable the screensaver manually from System Settings → Screen Saver and selecting Aerial4 from the list. It appears at the very bottom, so scroll down and press See More to reveal it. Be aware that starting with Sonoma — and continuing in Tahoe — this only sets the screensaver for the current screen and Space. Use Aerial’s built-in Set as Default activation instead if you want it on every monitor.

On first launch, the migration wizard offers to move your downloaded video cache into Aerial 4’s new location — that’s the data that carries over. Preferences, overlays, and source list start fresh, because Aerial 4 ships with a new screensaver extension, a new settings file, and a new overlay system.

The first-launch wizard picks sensible defaults for you: the Modern overlay preset, 4K 240 fps video format, and optional Wallpaper Continuity. You can re-run it later from Settings if you skipped through.

Apple introduced AppExtension screensavers (.appex) all the way back in macOS 10.15 (Catalina) — that’s the format Apple’s own video screensavers (the aerial views built into macOS) have used ever since. But the API has been private the entire time; Apple has never documented it publicly, which is why every other third-party screensaver still ships in the older .saver bundle format.

Aerial 4 is the first third-party screensaver to implement this via the private API. We hope that after all these years, Apple will finally make it public soon!

What this gets you in practice:

• Better compatibility — no more random black screens, no more stacking screensaver instances on wake, and a long list of long-standing bugs that piled up against the legacy .saver host over the years are simply gone.
• Better isolation and stability — Aerial runs in its own process and sandbox, not bundled inside Apple’s shared legacy screensaver host alongside every other .saver you have installed.
• Better permission needs — you no longer need to grant Full Disk Access for Aerial to work.

This required a significant rewrite from Aerial 3, which still uses the older .saver format.

Drag Aerial.app from /Applications to the Trash. To also remove cached videos and settings, delete /Users/Shared/Aerial/. That’s it — no installer to reverse, no daemon or Launch Service hidden in ~/Library.

Yes. The screensaver itself is a macOS app extension bundled inside Aerial.app; quitting the menu-bar UI doesn’t disable it. Some advanced features still need the app running in the background — automatic video downloads, weather updates, live-feed transmuxing — but the basic screensaver keep going on its own.

No — Aerial is macOS only. It needs the system-level screensaver and wallpaper hooks that exist only on the Mac, plus a few macOS frameworks for HDR decoding and overlay rendering.

No — Aerial is macOS only and there are no plans to port it. Third-party projects inspired by Aerial do exist for other platforms, but none are affiliated with this project and we can’t vouch for them. If you need Apple’s aerial videos on another OS, your best bet is to search for a community port specific to that platform.

Aerial 4 requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later and runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Older macOS versions are not supported by the 4.x cycle. If you’re on macOS 14 or earlier, you can still use Aerial 3.x — but new features land in 4.

Yes. In the app, open the popover in your menu bar then open the Video Library (third icon at the bottom) and look for the “My Videos” section at the left where you’ll be able to drag’n drop your own videos. You can also move your .mov / .mp4 files into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/. Aerial will pick them up automatically and you can edit titles, locations, and metadata from the app in the section mentionned above.

Yes — open Video Library → Sources → Add From Link and paste the URL. YouTube limitation: only live feeds work. Regular VOD videos and scheduled Premieres aren’t supported, and there’s no channel or playlist scraping — paste the live URL directly.

Direct stream URLs (HLS .m3u8, RTSP, RTSPS, and progressive HTTP MP4) work the same way. Live entries play straight from the network, so they need an active connection while they’re on screen.

Some of these need third-party command-line tools to work: YouTube requires yt-dlp and RTSP requires ffmpeg. Both are easiest to install via Homebrew (brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg). Aerial will show the exact install command in-app if one is missing.

A note on YouTube: despite the yt-dlp project’s best efforts, YouTube support frequently breaks when YouTube changes things on their end. If a stream stops working, the first thing to try is updating yt-dlp (brew upgrade yt-dlp) — fixes usually land there within hours. For deeper issues, check the yt-dlp project directly. YouTube support in Aerial is provided on a best-effort basis and we can’t offer direct support for it.

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

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 when you open the app, not 24/7. That makes them poor fits for a screensaver even if 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 / Eufy (varies by model and current vendor app version). We don’t maintain or endorse any specific bridge — they tend to break when vendors push app updates. Check your camera model’s community for what’s working right now.

If QuickTime plays it, Aerial plays it. The sweet spot is MP4 or MOV containers with H.264 or HEVC (H.265). Drop files into Video Library → My Videos (or copy them into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/).

If your file doesn’t play (older AVI, MKV, niche codecs), transcode it. Use HandBrake for a GUI workflow or ffmpeg on the command line. H.265 with the hvc1 tag gives the best playback — hardware decode plus small files. ffmpeg example:

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, most community Expansion packs) download to disk and play from the cache — fast, offline-friendly, smooth. Live videos (YouTube live feeds, RTSP cameras) play straight from the network because they have no end and nothing to cache.

The popover marks live entries, and they need an active connection while playing. If a live feed goes offline, Aerial skips it on the next rotation rather than freezing on a blank frame.

Open Aerial → Video Library → Expansions to browse community-made video packs. Each pack carries its own license and is installed only when you tap Install. You can see and manage every source from the same panel.

Settings → Overlays → Open Editor. It’s a drag-and-drop canvas where you place clocks, dates, weather, location names, music info, and message overlays into one of seven on-screen zones. Each overlay has its own font, opacity, and color settings.

Two presets are included: Modern — a large translucent top-center clock with overlays in the corners — and Classic — clock and location stacked bottom-left, the Aerial 3 look. You can also start from a blank slate.

Settings → Displays → Viewing Mode controls this. Independent (default) — each monitor gets its own playlist and pauses independently. Shared / Cloned — playback synchronizes across screens, useful for a picture-wall look.

In Independent mode, per-screen filters live in the popover’s Now Playing section — switch to a screen, then pick a source / location / favorite / playlist for it.

The current filter drives the playlist. Set it via Set to play now on a source, location, favorite, Expansion, or user playlist — anywhere you see that button. Pick shuffle vs. loop in Settings → Screensaver.

Time of day matters too. Most Apple videos are tagged sunrise / day / sunset / night, and Aerial uses your location (or your manual override in Settings → Time) to pick scenes that match the time of day.

Yes — three system-wide shortcuts for the core playback actions: toggle pause/resume, previous video, and next video. They work even when Aerial isn’t focused, so you can pause or skip from any app or while the screensaver is running.

Enable them in Settings → Accessibility → Global Shortcuts (off by default). The defaults are intentionally uncommon four-modifier presses — ⌃⌥⌘+Space, ⌃⌥⌘+←, ⌃⌥⌘+→ — so they don’t clash with anything else. Each shortcut can be re-recorded or cleared on its own.

Yes. Aerial 4 was built with VoiceOver in mind — accessibility labels are wired through the menu bar popover, video library, Expansions, settings panels, and the first-launch wizard. VoiceOver also automatically announces video changes (“Now playing: name”) and download completions, so you can keep track of playback without opening anything.

VoiceOver support is still a relatively young feature, so there are probably rough edges we haven’t caught yet. If you rely on VoiceOver, please reach out with feedback — what works, what’s confusing, what’s missing. We want to make it as good as we can.

No. Aerial includes no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting of any kind. It downloads videos directly from Apple’s CDN, fetches the Sparkle update feed and the expansions catalog over HTTPS directly from github, and stores everything locally. There is no Aerial server collecting data about you. Some optional features (Weather forecast via OpenWeather, Youtube streaming via yt-dlp, etc) may individually track you in some form, we recommend you check their respective privacy policies for more details.

Wallpaper Continuity (Settings → Wallpaper → Replace wallpaper) replaces your macOS System Settings wallpaper with a still frame of the currently playing video. The frame updates each time a new video starts.

Why it matters: macOS shows your system wallpaper in places where Aerial’s live video can’t reach — the menu bar tint, Mission Control and Exposé previews, and the brief moment between login and Aerial coming back. Continuity makes those moments visually match the current scene instead of a fallback macOS wallpaper. On macOS 26 it pairs with the Wallpaper Cache Cleanup sub-option (see below).

macOS 26 has a bug in its wallpaper agent: every wallpaper image it’s asked to display gets cached, and that cache is never cleaned. Aerial with Wallpaper Continuity sets the wallpaper many times per session — every video change, every Space switch, every wake from sleep — so the leak adds up fast. Real-world growth is in the tens of gigabytes over a few weeks.

The Wallpaper Cache Cleanup option (Settings → Wallpaper → Automatically clean wallpaper cache, on by default when continuity is enabled on macOS 26) keeps that cache pruned to 2 GB. The first time you enable it, macOS asks you to grant Aerial access to the folder — that’s a one-time prompt. We hope Apple fixes the underlying bug in a future macOS update; in the meantime this keeps wallpaper continuity from quietly filling your drive.

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

Settings → Wallpaper → Pause when wallpaper is hidden auto-pauses playback when windows cover most of the screen — default 60% coverage, adjustable. This saves GPU and CPU when you can’t see the video anyway, and playback resumes at your configured speed as soon as you uncover the desktop.

When the active video is HDR, Wallpaper Continuity has to pull a still frame and write it to the macOS wallpaper image. The Dolby Vision tone-mapping that makes the playing video look correct can’t be applied to a single extracted frame (Apple only exposes that decoder path to live AVPlayerLayer rendering), so the wallpaper image shows wrong colors. The video itself looks great on screen — only the desktop background snapshot is affected.

Workaround: pick an SDR format for Wallpaper Continuity, or turn the feature off when using HDR. The app shows a warning in Settings → Desktop when this combination is selected.

There are two possible reasons for this. On older Intel macs, 4K HDR video decoding can be GPU-intensive, particularly because of the tone mapping needed to display the colors accurately. On Apple Silicon, Aerial uses full hardware decoding and the load is insignificant in practice — even at 240fps. If you’re on Intel and notice heat, switch to a 4K SDR variant in Format settings, or even 1080p if it’s still a concern.

The second reason is not specific to Aerial : macOS does defer many tasks to when the screensaver starts. macOS background services for auto tagging your photo/video library is the most common culprit for increased heat/fan usage. This is particularly apparent after you add a large bunch of photos/videos in your library, or just after a major macOS upgrade where Photos.app will rescan your entire library to update the tags.