Thursday, January 21, 2010

Want to use a video as a screensaver?

I was bored of my standard screensavers so a few minutes ago I decided I wanted to use video as a screensaver. It emerges that Microsoft ditched DreamScene in 7 due to performance issues but there's an easy workaround:

Get a video. If you've already got it on your computer - great. If not, click this link Savevid.com and it'll let you save streaming videos to your computer. Is it legal? I guess it depends on what you download. Is it easy? Yes. I picked a couple of great "atmospheric" videos I found online in HD and downloaded them. Next, you need to have Windows Live Photo Gallery installed in order to use a video as a screensaver. Just go to your screensaver settings, choose Windows Live Photo Gallery, click Settings, pick the folder where your videos are and you're done. I had to do one additional step - I used Movie Maker to convert my downloaded videos from MP4 because it looks like even though WLPG will play MP4 format, it doesn't want to do it in screensaver mode. Still easy - the hardest bit was waiting for the typing lag as I'm blogging this from the sofa while emailing while uploading photos while rendering video and playing music on my little XT with its little 1.2GHz ULV processor. CPU usage has been at 100% for a while now - but that's what it's for isn't it? :-)

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