UBUNTU DEBIAN LINUX minihowto howto set / put an animated background wallpaper with a video, mpg, avi, gif, flash, etc using xwinwrap mplayer and gnash

Set a animated background wallpaper in our desktop using Ubuntu – Intrepid and mplayer xwinwrap and gnash is a very simple task (with a little modification you can set it for using them on any *NIX based OS, including any Linux and *BSD).

**Am pretty sure that am not the first person to tell you how to do this, remember use Google for better solutions.

Become root and:

apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev x11proto-xext-dev libxrender-dev libxext-dev cvs
cd
mkdir cvs
cd cvs
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xapps co xwinwrap
cd xwinwrap
make
cp xwinwrap /usr/bin

Thats it!, here some Examples:
xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- mplayer -wid WID -nosound "your.movie" -loop 0

Replace “your-movie” with whatever movie you like to play.
In the above example, supress ‘-nosound’ to heard sound and if you wish to loop it, change ‘ -loop 0 ‘ with the number of times you wish to replay such file.

To set a “screensaver” as desktop background:

 nice -n 15 xwinwrap -ni -o 0.20 -fs -s -sp -st -b -nf -- /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root -window-id WID 

Replace ‘glmatrix’ with whatever screensaver you like, and please note -root parameter there!

Mplayer:

xwinwrap -ni -o 0.6 -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- mplayer -wid WID -quiet movie.mpg

mplayer -nosound -loop 0 -fixed-vo -wid 0 YOUR.gif 

Note: Replace YOUR.gif with your .gif file (do the same with movie.mpg)

To set a flash file to be desktop background (this is insane partly because Flash uses a LOT of resources!!).
For fun try to install gnash
apt-get install gnash


Here some examples using a external link from a existing random URI (website):

xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- gnash --fullscreen http://www.crazyimages.com/ganjascope.swf
xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- gnash --fullscreen http://www.phong.com/cover/flower.of.phong00.swf
xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- gnash --fullscreen http://www.crazyimages.com/intro1.swf
xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- gnash --fullscreen http://www.crazyimages.com/digiflex.swf
xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- gnash --fullscreen http://www.crazyimages.com/engine.swf

TIP: add & at the end of line to force run as background process.
To set an existing flash file in your box, replace the link (URI) with /path/to/flash.swf
To stop you can kill the process like this:

killall gtk-gnash

Like I said before …there is LOTS of ways to do this, use Google be happy .

(Is possible to use VLC alone because VLC had the opcion to play as a background build-in already, read VLC manual)