Vista Ultimate ships with a feature called Dreamscene that enables you to add video wallpapers to the operating system that play on the desktop.
It is currently available as a preview version that comes with the Dreamscene Content Package that Ultimate users can download and install on their systems.
The Dreamscene content package adds four new videos to the system that Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise users can add as video wallpapers to their operating system.
It is nice that Microsoft added the functionality to Windows Vista Ultimate but all other versions lack the functionality because the feature is one of the – few – extras that Microsoft makes only available for that edition of the operating system.
I do not like how Microsoft is limiting features in Windows Vista editions as it can be highly confusing to consumers as they need to find out about all the differences before they can make a buying decision. It can be really frustrating if the version of Vista that you bought lacks a feature that you require for instance.
While you can purchase an upgrade to get the feature eventually, you’d spend more time than you should need to on the whole process.
Let me highlight how you can add video wallpapers to any version of Windows Vista, and other Windows versions as well.
All you need is the free VLC media player. Just open a video file in VLC, right-click on it and select wallpaper from the menu. You can load videos either via drag and drop, by using the Media menu at the top, or if VLC is associated with video files, by double-clicking on them on the system.
That’s it basically. You can fine tune the video wallpaper further by going to Tools > Preferences > Interface (if you do not see it select show all settings at the bottom) > Video to check “Enable wallpaper mode”. This basically plays the video on your desktop when VLC is running.
It seems that recent versions of the player do not have some of the other options that previous versions of the player had. It is for instance necessary to keep VLC running in the background for the video to play on the desktop.