I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers
Details
- External ID
- 48215979
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 20, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 428
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9854604200323102
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Ever since Apple introduced their video wallpapers I wanted to be able to put custom videos there. I decided to reverse engineer and see what I can do.I built Phosphene to sell it, but the existing competitors were polished enough that the time it would have taken to catch up wasn't going to pay off. So I'm open-sourcing it.WallpaperExtensionKit.framework is what powers macOS wallpapers. It controls what’s shows in the Settings app. It took a lot of trial and error to replicate the behavior, but the result is that your custom wallpapers appear alongside everything else. I wanted to have an “add” button there too, but I couldn’t find a way to do so, so there’s a companion app that will put your video where it needs to be.Unlike Apple's Aerials, the video keeps playing on the desktop (not just the lock screen). The renderer drives AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer directly with PTS-offset gapless looping, and pauses or downshifts based on thermal state, battery level, brightness, and window occlusion.It’s free and works well.
Enrichment
- Theme
- screen recording and demo creation tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- apple video wallpaper reverse engineering
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The front-end utility app is straightforward, but reverse engineering undocumented macOS private frameworks and handling video wallpaper hooks requires specialized reverse engineering and macOS internal knowledge.
What it would actually take: The software requires reverse engineering private macOS daemons (like wallpaperd and Sonoma aerial screen saver caches) using tools like Hopper, Ghidra, and class-dump. The app must interface via Swift/Objective-C with undocumented Apple APIs, manipulate internal Plist and SQLite databases, and safely bypass or satisfy SIP/sandboxing constraints without breaking OS updates.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Video playback stops after considerable time on lock screen, Performance issues with security monitoring apps during screensaver, Unclear documentation about lock screen vs desktop behavior
Feature requests: Demo in readme, Option to keep wallpaper playing on lock screen, Control when wallpaper freezes
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 382 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 383 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 203 days after the earliest competitor.
- An MCP server that frames screen recordings and shots in Apple bezels · hn · 2026-07-16 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Prequel · ph · 2026-08-30 · 213 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Asight · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- VoxelWall · ph · 2026-09-12 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- TapWall · github · 2026-09-17 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Bezel · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I made a screen recording app to make demos like an Apple commercial · hn · 2026-05-13 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- FrameSight Pro · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.