xanim

About the project

xanim is an animated wallpaper engine for X11 using Xlib, OpenCV and SDL which uses low system resources (<1% CPU on my six-core machine). It works by extracting frames from a video and pumping them into the X11 root window via an SDL_Renderer (inspirated by glouw/paperview). Frames are extracted using OpenCV so the supported formats depend on its support, but the most common formats should work.

I tested xanim on my system (i5-8400) and it used <1% CPU for a Full-HD gif. Although performance is not a problem, I have experienced issues when trying to display large videos. For some reason, SDL_Textures are not consistently put into VRAM, so large videos might be put in your RAM and exhaust it.

Another problem might arise when using composite managers like xcompton, picom or xcompmgr, who draw to an off-screen buffer and then display the full frame with all windows on the root window. This causes problems and glitches so I discourage the use of a composite manager. If you manage to find the root for this problem, please create a pull request or send it to me and I will gladly fix it.

Getting started

This project uses a Makefile, so you need make and a C++ compiler like gcc or clang to build the project. First clone the repository and then you can build it:

    git clone https://github.com/Baseng0815/xanim
    cd xanim
    make
    sudo make install

Requirements are SDL2, OpenCV and Xlib.

Usage

    xanim [OPTION]... [FILE]

You can display the video either on a specific monitor, on each monitor, stretched over all monitors or on a given, manual area. For details, check out xanim --help.

Roadmap

• Fix the RAM issue
• Make the program work with composite managers

Contact

E-Mail: [email protected]