Omarchy 4.5 backgrounds can now be videos, played by the OWE wallpaper engine
Drop a video into your theme’s backgrounds folder and it sits right next to your images. Just remember that it plays with sound and draws far more power than a still.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #6792 (GitHub)
“Backgrounds can now be videos.” That’s how the Omarchy 4.5 release notes, published on November 4, 2026, introduce one of the release’s most eye-catching features: “Drop one in, and your desktop comes alive with rolling waves or whatever else you fancy.”
Adding one really is that simple. According to the Omarchy manual, your extra backgrounds live in ~/.config/omarchy/backgrounds/[theme], and you can “drop an mp4, m4v, mov, webm, mkv, or avi file in the same folder and it appears alongside the images.”
The feature started with “Add native video wallpaper support”, a pull request from @gardensazurescens that DHH merged on September 6, 2026, under the 4.5 milestone. It taught background selection, cycling and theme previews to find video files, and it generated still thumbnails for the picker. That first version played videos silently through Qt Multimedia inside the shell, but it didn’t stay that way for long.
Just 15 days later, on September 21, 2026, “Replace the shell’s desktop video path with OWE” from @bjarneo was merged. It removed the shell’s Qt Multimedia player and handed desktop playback to OWE, a dedicated wallpaper engine. owed.service is enabled on fresh installs, and a migration installs OWE and enables the service for everyone else.
Here’s what that means on your desktop. The manual says OWE “decodes the video once for all monitors and plays its sound through the default audio output,” so pick a clip with no audio track if you don’t want a soundtrack. It also “stops playback whenever nothing can see it.” The OWE README lists the default pauses as a fullscreen window, the lock screen, monitors turned off and sleep.
The manual doesn’t sugarcoat the cost: “A video wallpaper still costs far more power than a still one.” Battery handling is off by default, according to the README, but you can set battery_mode to "pause" or "poster" in ~/.config/owe/config.toml to hold the current frame or show a still poster when you’re unplugged. As for the lock screen, the release notes say it “shows a still frame” from your video.
OWE is also very young. Its repository was created on September 16, 2026, the latest release is 0.2.13 from October 30, 2026, and the README is upfront about it: “This project is experimental. Use it at your own risk.“
One last round of polish made the cut for 4.5. OWE #27 and Omarchy #17082, both from @bjarneo and merged on October 30, 2026, turn a switch from a still to a video into a single fade. Measured from 60 fps screen recordings on an Intel Arc B390, the still now holds until 120 ms and fades into the moving video by 395 ms when the renderer is already parked. With no renderer running, it holds until 255 ms and fades by 545 ms, where the screen used to stay black for 400 ms. The release notes sum it up as “Fix a flicker when switching from a still to a video background.”
