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Customized Aerial Screen Saver

Overview

Since macOS 14.0 Sonoma, Apple has brought Aerial Screen Savers from tvOS to macOS, which provides stunning live screen savers when the device is locked.

However, it does not provide the ability to customize, so, here's a solution to that! With Customized Aerial Screen Saver, you can add whatever the video you want for Aerial Screen Saver!

Usage

You'll need

  • A .mov video
  • A .jpg image for video preview

Recommended Video Format

Attribute Requirements
Length At least 15 seconds
Audio Track Prefer no audio track
FPS (Frames Per Second) At 60 FPS
Aspect Ratio 16:9
Resolution At least 1920x1080
Video Format Must be .mov

Upon launch the app, you must enter your password in order to modify system resources.

And click "Add Custom Aerial Screen Saver", enter a name for the screen saver, then drag your video and preview image, click "Add" to add the customized screen saver

You can view and delete existing Aerial Screen Savers in the app.

A section "Customized Area" should appear in Screen Saver in System Settings.

Select it and enjoy!

How does it work?

Given a password prompt exists in the app, regardless the app is open-sourced, a full disclosure is better than anything that you can do to earn everyone's trust, right?

The work behind the app is simple All the aerial screen saver assets are stored under /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/

Where videos are under /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4KSDR240FPS

and preview images are under /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/snapshots

And there goes a JSON /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/entries.json which stores all aerial screen saver's info

By modifying the JSON, you can add whatever you want as an Aerial Screen saver, that's why you'll need to provide your password in order to modify these files.

Known issues

  • It may take some time for the screen saver to appear in the System Settings, since it will take some time for macOS to update Aerial Screen Saver's data under /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Aerial.sqlite*
    • I am working on how to trigger the update of the database, however I have no clue at the moment.

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