Features
Aerial is the macOS screensaver and live wallpaper for people who care about how their desktop looks when they're not using it. Below: every feature, with the honest trade-offs where they exist.
Drop any `.mov` or `.mp4` into a single folder and Aerial picks it up — title it, tag it, hide it, send it to a playlist.
Adding personal videos used to be a frustrating dance with JSON files. Now you drop them into /Users/Shared/Aerial/My Videos/ (or use the in-app importer) and they land in your library next to Apple’s. You can edit metadata, attach points-of-interest, group them into playlists, or just let them play in rotation alongside the Apple aerials.
macOS 26's new 4K 240fps videos play as a calm live wallpaper, smart-paused when your desktop fills with windows.
The 4K 240fps video set Apple shipped in macOS 26 is the headline of Aerial 4. The high frame rate isn’t there for tech-demo bragging rights — it’s what makes the live wallpaper mode breathe. Aerial slows playback down to an ambient pace without dropping frames or stuttering, because the source has plenty of frames to draw from. And because a wallpaper running full-tilt behind covered windows wastes battery and GPU, Aerial pauses automatically when your desktop is mostly hidden by other apps and resumes the moment there’s space to see it again — threshold configurable.
Stream RTSP cameras, HLS feeds, or YouTube live URLs directly as your screensaver. Real-time, no caching.
Add a live URL — RTSP camera, HLS stream, or YouTube live — and Aerial transmuxes it on the fly into a screensaver-ready source. There’s no caching: what you see is the stream as it happens. RTSP requires ffmpeg and YouTube live needs yt-dlp. Instructions provided.
Drag and drop the clock, weather, location captions, and more into seven on-screen zones — with a live preview as you go.
Older versions buried overlays inside a preferences table. Aerial 4 swaps that for a visual editor: pick a zone (top-left, top-center, top-right, center, bottom-left, bottom-center, bottom-right), drag in clock, date, weather, music, battery, timer, countdown, or a custom message, and see the result instantly. Per-zone stacks, shadow, margins, fonts, and timing are all there — without touching a settings file.
On multi-monitor setups, you can configure each display’s overlays independently. And desktop wallpaper mode keeps its own separate set, so you can run a heavier layout on the screensaver and a quieter one on your live wallpaper — or the other way around.
Run the same engine behind your windows as a moving wallpaper. Auto-pauses when your desktop is mostly covered, so it never burns CPU on nothing.
The same playback engine that drives the screensaver can run as your live desktop background. Wallpaper continuity keeps macOS’s Mission Control and lock-screen wallpaper in sync with the playing video, so you never see a stale image when you wake from sleep. Aerial pauses automatically when most of the desktop is covered by windows — configurable threshold, battery-aware, and respects Night Shift.
Run independent videos per screen, mirror one across many, share a playlist, or span a single 4K video across the whole desk.
Aerial detects each monitor natively (including same-size displays on Apple Silicon, which macOS itself often gets wrong) and lets you choose: independent videos per screen with their own filters, a mirrored single video, a shared playlist, or spanned mode — a single video stretched across every display for one continuous cinematic shot. Spanned is a longtime favorite of multi-monitor setups.
Play, pause, and skip backward or forward through the live wallpaper without leaving whatever you're working in. Bind any keys you like.
Aerial 4 adds system-wide hotkeys for the desktop wallpaper. Bind your own combinations to play/pause, next video, previous video, or skip in either direction — they work no matter which app is in focus, even fullscreen. Useful when a great shot is playing and you want to hold on it, or when one isn’t the mood and you want to jump past without breaking flow.
Browse and install curated video packs from creators like Joshua Michaels & Hal Bergman — right inside the app, no JSON editing.
Beyond Apple’s library, Aerial supports community-made expansions: high-quality video packs from contributors who share their work back to the project. Browse the catalog inside the Video Library, tap install, and the new videos show up in your filter list immediately. Each pack carries its own license; nothing is auto-installed without your consent.
Drag videos into curated playlists, share them across devices, and play exclusively from one if that's your mood.
A playlist is your own ordered list of videos pulled from any source — Apple’s library, expansions, or your own files. Create as many as you like, share them between Macs, and switch which one plays at any time. Useful for separating “background while I work” from “ambient at the end of the day.”
