Microsoft is finally bringing native video wallpapers to Windows 11 — 19 years after Windows Vista's DreamScenes

Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, and first spotted by Insider sleuth @phantomofearth on X, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop.

For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.

For whatever reason, DreamScene was never carried forward in future versions of Windows, and so the OS has been without the native capability of setting video as your desktop background ever since. Third-party apps have since stepped up to fill that void, with tools like Lively Wallpaper and Wallpaper Engine letting you set not just video, but 3D environments and interactive spaces as your wallpaper too.

But users shouldn't have to download a third-party tool to set a basic video as their wallpaper, and it sounds like they won't have to in the near future. With native video wallpaper support coming soon to Windows 11, the process for setting a video as your wallpaper will be the same as it is when setting an image as your wallpaper, which is to say quick and easy.

It's unknown how this will impact battery life or performance, but it's good to see Microsoft is building out the feature as an option for people who want it either way. The feature was first spotted by Phantomofearth on X, and appears to be hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds that rolled out earlier this week to Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channels. As Microsoft is yet to officially announce the feature, we're likely still a number of weeks out before it begins rolling out to everybody.