Everything Aerial does.

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.

Native Wallpaper Extension Beta

In the 4.1 beta, Aerial is a native macOS Wallpaper Extension. It appears in System Settings › Wallpaper like a built-in wallpaper, and the video plays as your actual desktop — there’s nothing underneath it. It even keeps playing on the login screen after your Mac wakes from sleep.

On first launch you pick how it behaves: Still, a frame from the current video that updates as scenes change — the way macOS wallpapers normally work — or Live, the video itself with window-aware auto-pause. Switch between the two anytime with the wallpaper Play/Pause button in the Aerial menu bar.

Auto-pause got smarter, too. Settings shows exactly which apps are covering the wallpaper, with live coverage percentages, and you can tell Aerial to ignore the ones that shouldn’t count — like utilities that keep a transparent window over the whole screen. And if you’d rather never stare at the same scene all day, Auto-Advance moves to a new video on a schedule you pick, even while playback is paused.

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later.

The Video Library now opens on a home screen: a card for each display (one card when they’re mirrored or spanned), a viewing-mode switcher, quick playback selection, and your overlays at a glance. The fastest way to see what’s playing where — and change it.

Choose how one video hands off to the next: hard cut, crossfade, dip to black, or a subtle zoom fade — with the duration you want. Transitions play in both wallpaper and screensaver mode, and manual skips use a quicker fade so you’re never left waiting.

The 4.1 beta brings massive CPU-usage reductions in both the app and the extension, faster startup, and a seamless handoff between wallpaper and screensaver — no more flashes of stale frames when your Mac wakes or you log in.

The beta also picks better moments to stay quiet: optional pauses under thermal pressure, in Low Power Mode, and while your camera is in use — Aerial only reads the camera’s on/off state, never the picture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”