Win4KSS v1.1.0 — BROKEN, see v1.1.1

Warning

This release is broken — do not install it. It crashes on every single install attempt with "Internal error: An attempt was made to expand the 'app' constant before it was initialized," before any files are even copied. Use v1.1.1 instead, which fixes this and adds a .NET Desktop Runtime check.

Second release. Three real changes since v1.0.0.

What changed

• The clip browser. /c (or the Start Menu shortcut) now opens a full clip-browsing UI: tag filters, sortable thumbnail grid, hover previews, a live detail pane, and per-clip "in rotation" / "keep offline" controls across ~1,500 clips from Apple, the Internet Archive, NASA and a few vendor feeds. The old plain settings dialog is gone.
• Settings export/import. Settings → About → "Backup / move to another machine" writes a readable *.win4kss.json file (your rotation, pins, playback/cache preferences — not the video cache itself) that imports cleanly on another install. Also available headless: Win4KSS.exe --export-settings <file> / --import-settings <file>.
• Packaging changed to fix an antivirus false positive — without losing the Screen Saver Settings dropdown. v1.0.0 bundled its native DLLs (libmpv-2.dll, the WebView2 loader) inside a single self-extracting exe — a pattern some antivirus heuristics (confirmed: Bitdefender) flag on sight, since it's structurally how a dropper behaves, regardless of what the code actually does. This build ships those as ordinary loose files next to Win4KSS.exe instead, which removes that pattern. To keep this app listed in Windows' own Screen Saver Settings dropdown (which only ever scans System32 for .scr files) without putting those DLLs in System32 itself — System32 sits on every process's DLL search path, and a name like WebView2Loader.dll is shared across every WebView2 app on the machine, so a copy there could get picked up by unrelated software — the installer now builds a second, separate single-file variant with no native DLLs bundled at all just for that one slot; it finds libmpv/WebView2 in the regular installed copy at startup instead. Verified on a real machine: System32 ends up holding exactly one new file, nothing else.
  • This isn't a guarantee of zero AV flags anywhere. A brand-new, unsigned file still has no download history, and that alone can draw a first-contact flag from one or two engines independent of anything structural. If you hit one, it's worth a false-positive report (see docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md), and checking virustotal.com against the exact file is the fastest way to see the real multi-engine picture.

Install

Download Win4KSS-Setup-1.1.0.exe below, run it, SmartScreen will likely warn since it's unsigned (expected, click through it). "Make Win4KSS available in Windows' Screen Saver Settings" is checked by default.

Full docs: README.md · Troubleshooting · Third-party notices

Unofficial, not affiliated with Apple. See third-party notices for the GPL libmpv build and the licensing breakdown of the streamed clip catalogue.