Hanabi is a GNOME Shell extension that allows using a live wallpaper (video) on the GNOME desktop, with support for both X11 and Wayland.
According to the developer, the extension “is not even close to alpha quality”, but it's already usable, albeit you'll need to install it manually since it's not available on the GNOME Shell extensions website.
This live wallpaper GNOME extension currently supports playing a local video as your desktop background, with or without audio, and the ability to set the audio volume. From the extension top bar menu, you can pause the video and mute/unmute the audio.
To get the video playback to use less CPU, the extension comes with experimental support for VA-API hardware acceleration, as well as the ability to use the new Nvidia statless decoders. For best performance, the extension can utilize clappersink from Clapper (a GNOME media player that uses GStreamer as a media backend and renders everything via OpenGL)—this needs to be installed as a native package, and not as a Flatpak package. The extension GitHub page has a performance comparison on using Hanabi live wallpaper for GNOME with and without clappersink.
From the extension preferences, you can control how the live wallpaper fits within the monitor, allowing users to set the fit mode to fill, contain, cover and scale-down.
This is a short video I've recorded with Hanabi GNOME live wallpaper running on GNOME 44 (X11):
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Originally posted on Linux Uprising Blog.




