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Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

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Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#71

Post by dspillett »

charcircuit wrote: post #70
stavros wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the joke.

[flagged]

> Encouraging such behavior will waste people's time having to deal with people on this site who can't do simple arithmetic.

We shouldn't encourage people who can't properly read and understand a comment before replying either, but here we are talking to you who jumped on correcting the “2 or 3 years” to “19 years” without noticing that “2007” was in the post so the poster was obviously well aware of that.

> being unable to subtract two simple numbers is not funny

1. That is not the joke. It is referencing how humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates to the actual reality, especially as we age.

2. Humour is subjective. So is, to an extent, the amount of it that is acceptable in a given environment. Sense of humour is sometimes objectively non-existent, as you helpfully illustrate by clear example.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#72

Post by darkwater »

Gigachad wrote: post #26
riddlemethat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m imagining dozens of people worldwide sharing your nostalgia for Vista.

It's called frutiger aero now. Lot of people very bored with modern safe design nostalgic for when tech and UI was weird and bold.

Let a sufficient amount of time pass, and what people knew in their children/teenage years will be remembered with nostalgia.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#74

Post by dspillett »

asimovDev wrote: post #61
buildbot wrote: post #10

As much (fairly well deserved) hate as Tahoe gets, the video wallpapers and transparency are such a fun Windows Vista vibe I get nostalgia. Time to set this up with the Vista waterfall wallpaper and reallllyyy feel like it’s 2007!

https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Windows_Vista which waterfall are you talking about? i am also surprised to see how many wallpapers were apparently available on Vista. All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and I think I had the bamboo forest on at some point

> All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and…

IIRC at that time users were split fairly completely into three types: those who customised their OS look a lot, sometimes spending far too much time on it (I was one of them back then), those who had developed a preferred look and just kept that as much as possible between OS changes, and those who just used the defaults and got on with whatever else. This means the other wallpaper that someone at MS put effort into collecting together hardly ever got seen: many users kept the one default, and almost all who didn't had something that they chose from other sources. Maybe the other included images might have seen the light of day more often if there had been an explicit “choose your wallpaper” prompt as part of user on-boarding.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#75

Post by crimsontech »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #7
kageroumado wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they’ll touch this part anytime soon. It’s been unchanged for a few years now, they certainly have other priorities.

Good on ya. I won't use it, myself, because I can't deal with wallpaper moving behind my work (I also can't listen to music, while I work. Maybe it's a "generational" thing). Also, I use a 49-inch ultrawide, so it might be vomit-inducing. I remember some other utility that played wallpaper videos, but it wasn't anywhere near as nicely done.

It doesn't move while you work, its just the lock screen and when you log in.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#76

Post by tharropoulos »

Really nice work. We went down a similar rabbit hole recently and reverse engineered the Aerials catalogue to figure out how Apple wires this stuff up, so seeing another open source project doing this is great. The detail I love most and one I can't replicate on our own tool is how the animation persists between the login window and the live desktop. We built phonto as a cross platform take on the same idea, https://github.com/museslabs/phonto. I was about to start writing an article on the whole reverse engineering process and this might be the nudge I needed to start working on it.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#77

Post by happymellon »

Novosell wrote: post #60
throw310822 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could set a full-screen, interactive browser page as the backdrop of your desktop. Not sure what communication it was allowed to have with the desktop events, but I always thought it was a clever hack that could have been explored and expanded further.

Making even the background run electron, eh?

Unfortunately it was IE.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#78

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

crimsontech wrote: post #75
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good on ya. I won't use it, myself, because I can't deal with wallpaper moving behind my work (I also can't listen to music, while I work. Maybe it's a "generational" thing). Also, I use a 49-inch ultrawide, so it might be vomit-inducing. I remember some other utility that played wallpaper videos, but it wasn't anywhere near as nicely done.

It doesn't move while you work, its just the lock screen and when you log in.

Cool. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#79

Post by fps-hero »

I find it weird today that we are still fascinated by video wall papers.

This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.

Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.

I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.

But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?

They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.

Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!

Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.

I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.

Re: Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

#80

Post by jbs789 »

fps-hero wrote: post #79

I find it weird today that we are still fascinated by video wall papers. This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper. Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy. I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing,…

So in summary… it’s fun when you do it but “weird” when others do the same.

This is life. We discover things for ourselves, on our own time.

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