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Why I built this

A still desktop picture is a waste of a good screen. But most of the live wallpaper apps I tried came with a catch. Usually a subscription, or a Pro tier holding the good wallpapers hostage.

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.

What Muro does

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.

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Features

• 🌙 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.
• ⏱️ Automations. Give every wallpaper its own time. Ten seconds each, or a full day schedule where each wallpaper has its own hours.
• ⏸️ Pause after a set time. Let a wallpaper play for a while after it changes or after you unlock, then hold still. Set it in seconds, minutes or hours.
• 🗑️ Delete what you do not want. Remove wallpapers one at a time or several at once, imported videos included.
• 📥 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.
• ✨ Tells you when there is a new Muro. What's New shows what changed in the release and downloads it for you.
• 💾 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 for now, so it will not run on an Intel Mac. An Intel build is planned. 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.

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What it looks like

Watch Muro in action

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Install

Homebrew

brew install --cask MrRockySL/muro/muro

Manual download

1. Download the latest DMG from the Releases page.
2. Open it and drag Muro into your Applications folder.

On first launch, 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:

1. Double click the app once, then close the warning.
2. Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Muro, and click Open Anyway, then Open to confirm.
3. 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.

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Set it and forget it

Muro can change your wallpaper for you, two different ways.

On a timer. Pick a set of wallpapers, give each one a length, and Muro cycles through them. Ten seconds each, or an hour each, whatever suits. Every change is a crossfade, never a black flash.

By the clock. Give each wallpaper its own hours instead. Something calm for the morning, something else after dark. The day is drawn as a 24 hour timeline you drag, so you can see the whole thing at a glance rather than typing times into boxes.

Only one runs at a time, and you can start or stop either from the menu bar without opening the app.

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Let it play, then let it rest

A moving wallpaper is lovely for a minute and distracting for an hour.

Pause after lets a wallpaper play for a set time after it changes or after you unlock your Mac, then hold still on a frame. Set it in seconds, minutes or hours. It applies to everything by default, and any single wallpaper can override it or opt out entirely.

A held frame costs no CPU at all, so this is the lightest Muro ever gets while still showing you something you chose.

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Your library, your rules

Every wallpaper in your Library has a delete button, and you can select several and clear them together. Videos you imported yourself can go too, which was not possible before 3.0.

Nothing is ever deleted without asking first, and deleting a wallpaper cleans up everything that pointed at it: playlists, automations, and the lock screen.

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Muro tells you when there is a new version

When a new Muro is released, the What's New button in the top bar picks it up on its own. You get a dot on the button and a small note saying an update is available.

Open it and you see what actually changed in that release, read straight from the release itself, with a button that downloads the new version for you. The notes for the version you are already running sit underneath.

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New wallpapers arrive on their own

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.

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Build from source

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.

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How it works

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.

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Support Muro

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Supporters

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Contribute

Found a bug, have an idea, or want to improve something? Open an issue or send a pull request. Muro already carries code from other people and it is better for it.

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License

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. See NOTICE.

Made by MrRockySL.