video wallpaper

File this one under "stupid things you can make your computer do without Windows Vista." You may have heard by now that one of the freebies Microsoft is giving away to Vista Ultimate users is a little novelty app called "DreamScene" which turns any video file into a moving wallpaper.

Well MyDigitalLife has published an article detailing exactly how to accomplish the same thing... for free... and on Windows XP. And all you need is VLC media player.

It's not without its glitches though.
For one thing, you'll need to remember that this is VLC running in the background (i.e.: you can choose to skip the part where you hide it from the task bar, but then if you're like me and like your Alt-Tab shortcut, then you'll eventually swap back to the player. Videos with sound of course will also get annoying pretty quickly. Finally, I noticed that at the end of the playlist, VLC behaves unpredictably - in my case, it tried to loop the video to play again but then it not only paused, but it also became it's own full-screen video meaning an Alt-Tab me to a the full screen video instead of the VLC interface... man it was weird.

I'm going to keep playing with this and if anything interesting turns up I'll follow-up.