Everything Aerial does.

Aerial registers as a native macOS wallpaper extension. It appears in System Settings › Wallpaper next to Apple’s own wallpapers, the video is your real desktop with nothing underneath, and it keeps playing on the login screen after your Mac wakes from sleep.

And this is optional. When you first open Aerial, the setup assistant asks what you want: No wallpaper (just the screensaver), Still wallpaper (a frame from the current video, refreshed as videos change, the way Apple’s own video wallpapers behave once paused) or Live wallpaper (the video itself, pausing when windows cover it). You can switch at any time.

A video playing behind a wall of windows would waste battery and GPU for nothing, so Aerial watches how much of your desktop is visible and pauses past a threshold you choose, 60% covered by default. Settings › Wallpaper shows which apps are covering it right now, with live percentages, and lets you ignore the ones that shouldn’t count, such as utilities that keep a transparent window over the whole screen. The wallpaper can also pause on battery, under thermal pressure, in Low Power Mode, or while your camera is in use. And if you’d rather not look at the same paused frame all afternoon, Auto-Advance moves to a new video on a schedule of your choosing, even while paused.

The Video Library opens on a home screen: a card for each display (a single card when they’re cloned, mirrored or spanned) showing what’s playing there, along with the viewing mode, playback speed, cache and overlays, and buttons to change any of it. It’s also where Aerial tells you when it isn’t set as your screensaver or wallpaper yet, with a one-click fix.

If you’d rather have Aerial in the Dock than in the menu bar, that’s an option, and this window becomes its main window.

Pick the style and how long it takes. Transitions play in both wallpaper and screensaver mode, and manual skips use a quicker fade so you’re not left waiting.

Aerial 4.1 uses far less CPU than 4.0 did, in both the app and the wallpaper extension. It starts faster, and the handoff between wallpaper and screensaver is now seamless.

On top of pausing when windows cover the desktop, the wallpaper can pause while your Mac runs on battery, under serious thermal pressure (on by default), in Low Power Mode, and while any app uses the camera. Aerial only asks macOS whether the camera is on, it does not access your camera directly nor asks for access to it.

Playing your own footage used to take several steps. Now you can drop files into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/, or onto the My Videos section of the Video Library, and they show up next to Apple’s. From there you can edit the title, location, scene and time of day, group them into playlists, or just leave them in the rotation. If a video comes out upside down because its orientation metadata is unusual, you can rotate it from the app.

Apple’s 240 fps set, introduced with macOS 26, is the default format in Aerial 4 and the one most frequently updated when new videos come out. The high frame rate isn’t there for its own sake: with that many frames to draw from, Aerial can slow playback to an ambient pace, with the speed slider in the popover, without stutter or repeated frames. Decoding is fully hardware-accelerated, so the frame rate costs your Mac very little. On older Intel Macs, the plain 4K or 1080p formats are the better choice.

Add a feed from Video Library → Live Feeds, give it a name and a URL, and it joins your rotation like any other video, except that it plays live from the network and is never cached. HLS streams (.m3u8) and progressive MP4 play directly. RTSP cameras need ffmpeg, which Aerial uses to repackage the stream on the fly, and YouTube live streams need yt-dlp to find the stream URL. Both install with Homebrew, and Aerial shows you the exact command when one is missing.

Aerial 4 includes a visual overlay editor: pick a zone (a corner or center position), drag in a clock, date, location, weather, music, battery, timer, countdown or a message of your own, and watch it appear on a live preview. Fonts, colors, shadows, margins can all be tweaked to your taste.

Each display can have its own layout, and the wallpaper keeps a separate set from the screensaver, so you can run a busy layout on the screensaver and a quiet one behind your windows. The music overlay shows what’s playing in any audio app, the same way the Now Playing widget does, and an option keeps overlays visible on the lock screen if you wish them to.

Settings › Displays offers four viewing modes: Independent, a different video on each screen, each with its own filter; Cloned, the same video on every screen; Mirrored, the same video with every other screen flipped, for a symmetrical look; and Spanned, a single video stretched across all of them for one continuous shot, a long-time favourite of multi-monitor setups.

The screensaver gets its own display rules: pick which screens it plays on (the others go black), and you can override settings when external monitors are no longer connected.

Three system-wide shortcuts: toggle pause, previous video and next video. Turn them on in Settings › Accessibility and record any combination you like. The defaults are ⌃⌥⌘ with Space, ← and →, chosen so they don’t collide with anything else. Handy when a great shot comes up and you want to hold on it, or when one isn’t the mood and you’d rather skip it without breaking your flow.

Beyond Apple’s catalog, Aerial includes community-made packs from the people who share their work with the project. You can browse them in Video Library → Expansions, click install, and the new videos will show up in your filters right away. Each pack has its own license, and nothing is installed until you ask for it. The Expansions page shows what’s available.

A playlist is your own list of videos from any source: Apple’s catalog, expansions or your own files. Make as many as you like, set how long each video plays, export them as .json to carry them to another Mac, and switch to one from the popover whenever you want, say “background while I work” on one and “something nicer at the end of the day” on another.