A still desktop picture is a waste of a good screen. But every live wallpaper app I tried came with a catch. Usually a subscription, or a Pro tier holding the good wallpapers hostage, or worst of all, a fan that spins up the second you set one.
Most of them are Electron apps wrapping a web page. They sit at 300 to 400 MB of RAM and keep your CPU warm all day, for a picture that moves.
Muro is a native macOS app that plays looping video wallpapers on every display, and lets you browse them in a full screen gallery. It's written in Swift and SwiftUI, hands video decoding to the Apple Silicon media engine instead of the CPU, and pauses itself the moment you can't see it.
Everything is free. No Pro tier, no paywall, no license key, no account. Every wallpaper and every feature is unlocked.
- 🌙 Live video wallpapers. Looping, seamless, on every display at once.
- 🔒 Lock screen live wallpapers. Play a wallpaper on your lock screen too, not just the desktop. Set it to the desktop, the lock screen, or both, per display. Requires macOS 26 or newer.
- 🪶 Around 2% CPU while playing. HEVC decoded in hardware, never on the CPU.
- 😴 Pauses itself on full screen apps, display sleep, screen lock, Low Power Mode and low battery. A paused wallpaper costs 0% CPU.
- ⚡ Smooth or Efficient. Keep a wallpaper's original frame rate, or drop it to 30 fps to halve the power draw. Your choice, per wallpaper.
- 🖼️ Explore gallery. Browse the catalog, preview full screen, download only what you want.
- 🔄 New wallpapers arrive on their own. The library updates without updating the app. More on that below.
- 📃 Playlists. Rotate through a set on a timer, shuffled or in order.
- 📥 Import your own. Drop in any video and it gets transcoded once to HEVC and added to your library.
- 🎛️ Menu bar controls. Play, pause, skip and switch wallpapers without opening the app.
- 💾 Space control. See what each wallpaper costs on disk, and remove downloads you're done with.
- 🆓 Free and open source (MIT).
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer on an Apple Silicon Mac. The build is arm64 only and leans on the Apple Silicon media engine for hardware HEVC decoding. On macOS 26 and later the interface uses SwiftUI's native liquid glass; on older versions it falls back to translucent materials, which looks slightly different but works the same.
- Download the latest DMG from the Releases page.
- Open it and drag Muro into your Applications folder.
- Let it through macOS security. Muro is free and self signed rather than
carrying a paid Apple notarised certificate, so macOS blocks the first launch
with a "can't be opened… Apple could not verify it is free of malware"
warning. To get past it:
- Double click the app once, then close the warning.
- Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Muro, and click Open Anyway, then Open to confirm.
- (On older macOS you can right click the app instead, then pick Open twice.)
- Open Explore, pick a wallpaper, hit Apply. Done.
Muro keeps running in your menu bar after you close the window. That's what keeps your wallpaper playing. Use the menu bar icon to control it, or Quit to stop it.
You never have to update the app to get new wallpapers.
Muro re-reads its online catalog every time it launches or comes to the front, so anything newly published shows up in your Explore tab within about a minute. This works on every install that already exists, including older versions.
Videos only download when you pick one, and you can remove them again from the Library tab whenever you want the space back.
git clone https://github.com/MrRockySL/Muro.git
cd Muro/Muro
./build-app.sh --install # builds, bundles, signs, installs to /Applications./build-app.sh --dmg also produces dist/Muro-<version>.dmg.
The package builds MuroKit, which holds the shared engine and library code, the
app itself, and a handful of command line tools (muro-engine, muro-import,
muro-set, muro-prepare and muro-publish) that read the same config and
library files as the app.
Muro is native the whole way down: Swift, SwiftUI and AVFoundation. No Electron, no web views.
The wallpaper is a video playing in a window that sits just below your desktop icons, decoded in hardware by the Apple Silicon media engine, so the CPU barely participates. The moment the wallpaper can't be seen, Muro pauses it, and a paused wallpaper costs nothing.
This is an open project and contributions are very welcome. Found a bug, have an idea, or want to improve something? Open an issue or send a pull request. Let's make it better together.
Wallspace was the inspiration. It showed what a live wallpaper app for the Mac should look and feel like, and Muro's design takes its idea from there.
MIT, free to use and share. This covers the code only. Want something changed? Open an issue.
The wallpaper videos are not covered by the MIT license. Each one belongs to its original creator and is redistributed here under its own terms.
Made by MrRockySL.