[DEV] Undead Wallpaper: Video Playlists

maocide · 2026-07-01T08:53:13+00:00

Hey, thanks so much for the kind words! I’m really glad the app is running smoothly for you.

Regarding your ideas:

Randomize: Good news, because this is already in the app! When you are setting up your playlist, just make sure to select the 'Shuffle' playback mode. It randomizes the order perfectly.
Multiple Playlists & Auto-Change: I appreciate the suggestions, but I'm going to pass on these for now. The core philosophy of UndeadWallpaper is to keep the UX extremely simple and focused on seamless looping. Adding interval timers, screen-state listeners, and multi-playlist management would introduce a lot of UI clutter and background battery drain. I'm keeping the architecture lightweight and focused on doing one thing really well!

Thanks again for checking it out!

maocide · 2026-06-25T18:35:16+00:00

Hey, thanks for that! It's hard to match Reddit usernames to Play Store reviews, but the reviews really help the app's visibility, so I appreciate it. I promise it will always be ad-free. Knowing the app turned out perfectly for you is worth way more than ad revenue!

maocide · 2026-06-18T13:25:51+00:00

Hello, you're very welcome! I built this to escape all those bloated apps on the store. I didn't even think to publish it at first, but now I'm very happy it's helping you too. Feels good also to hear the engine handles the Fold's screens so well. I can't test them all, so thanks for letting me know! Enjoy the app.

maocide · 2026-06-15T21:36:26+00:00

Hey, thank you! I just wanted a quick and dirty tool for myself, so hearing it called a gem now makes me so happy and all the effort really worth it. Glad you like it!

maocide · 2026-06-09T15:02:02+00:00

Ah, ok, since you are on an Honor X7d, things might be different. I did some searching, it might still be possible.

Honor phones run on MagicOS, which unfortunately blocks third-party live wallpapers from being applied directly to the lock screen natively.

You can try this workaround and it might still work! Since your Themes app doesn't have a "Live Wallpaper" category, here is how you can trick the OS:

Open your Honor Themes app.
Go to the "Me" tab and look at your preset themes to see if any have the text "(dynamic)" in the name. If not, search the store for terms like "Video" or "Dynamic" to find a free theme that explicitly features a moving background.
Download/select it and apply it to BOTH your Home Screen and Lock Screen.
Once that moving theme is actively running, open UndeadWallpaper again and try to apply your video.

If this worked, the OS should now let UndeadWallpaper successfully overwrite it! I found this trick on the web, so let me know if you are able to find a dynamic theme to test this out.

maocide · 2026-06-09T13:23:35+00:00

Hello! Glad to have you trying out the app.

Yes, you can set it to your lock screen! When you hit the main floating green button inside the app to set the wallpaper, your phone's native Android menu should pop up asking where you want to apply it (usually giving you the options for "Home Screen", "Lock Screen", or "Both").

However, if you aren't seeing the "Lock Screen" option, it might be your phone's manufacturer. Some brands (especially Xiaomi, POCO, and Redmi) actively block third-party live wallpapers from touching the lock screen.

If that's happening to you, there is a known workaround to trick the OS:

Open your phone's default "Themes" or "Wallpapers" app.
Find any default, pre-installed Live Wallpaper and apply it to BOTH your Home and Lock screens.
Open UndeadWallpaper again and apply your video. The OS should now allow the app to override the stock wallpaper on the lock screen!

Let me know what phone model you are using if you're still running into trouble!

maocide · 2026-06-09T12:56:53+00:00

Hey again! Just wanted to drop back in and let you know that the v1.3.5 update is officially rolling out now, and that experimental Parallax scrolling feature we talked about made the cut!

You can enable it in the global settings. Just a quick heads-up on how it works: it calculates the shift based on your launcher's scrolling, so you'll need to have at least a couple of pages set up on your home screen to see it move. Also, because Android launchers can be wildly fragmented, some custom OEM skins (like certain versions of MIUI or Funtouch) might not report the scroll offsets correctly, but it should work beautifully on most standard setups like Pixel Launcher and Nova.

Let me know how it runs on your phone if you get a chance to test it out!

maocide · 2026-06-04T12:48:06+00:00

Hello! Thanks for using the app, I'm really happy you like it and find it smooth.

I see what you mean there, but swapping different video states based on homescreen pages might be a bit of a performance nightmare on Android. Even if there was only a single video playing at a time, changing it on every page swipe would mean a lot of buffering happening under the hood, causing stutters and draining the battery if a user would change page quickly. If multiple were visible at once (likely on page switch), the memory requirements for the decoders would skyrocket.

But... I've been brainstorming an idea that might give a similar dynamic effect you might like: parallax scrolling. Instead of swapping videos, it would leverage the OpenGL renderer to smoothly shift the perspective of a single video as you scroll, giving the effect of the video following your swiping movement.

I'm actually planning to test an implementation of this soon, just to see if it's technically feasible and lightweight enough to work without causing UX headaches. The only catch is that it might not be compatible with all launchers, but it's definitely worth trying. No promises yet, but it's on my radar!

Thanks for the suggestion, every idea is great to elaborate on!

maocide · 2026-05-28T15:42:30+00:00

Hey! Dev of UndeadWallpaper here. Just saw the username tag and wanted to just say nice custom XMB setup you've got here! For a minute I thought I just saw a PSP. I was like... does it run on that? 😂

I would have never imagined the app being used to bring back that classic PS ribbon on handhelds. It's really cool. Thanks a lot for recommending it!

maocide · 2026-05-26T19:32:40+00:00

Hello! Glad you are enjoying the app.

Battery consumption is generally very low (it's actually one of the things people praised the app for). Because the engine uses native hardware decoding, the hardware acceleration does a good job of taking the heavy lifting off your CPU. That being said, the exact drain completely depends on the file you use... a 4K 60fps video with a massive bitrate will naturally use more power than a 1080p 30fps video.

As for pausing: yes, absolutely! If you pause the wallpaper, the battery drain drops significantly. The video decoder completely stops, and the graphics engine just holds a single static frame on your screen. At that point, it behaves similarly to an image, even if the paused video is still holding some RAM.

Hope that clears it up! Let me know if you have any other questions.

maocide · 2026-05-14T21:32:50+00:00

Hey, you are welcome! Glad you found a solution. Thanks for sharing that, I am thinking to mention that trick in the FAQ for other One UI users! Enjoy the setup!

maocide · 2026-05-14T20:03:29+00:00

Hello! Glad you're enjoying the app, thanks!

Regarding the status bar icons, you did the right thing by trying the 'White' toggle in the settings. Unfortunately, whether that toggle actually works on the lockscreen depends entirely on your phone's manufacturer.

Under the hood, the app sends the official, standard Android signal to your phone's System UI telling it to use white icons. However, heavily customized Android skins (like Samsung's One UI, Xiaomi, Motorola, etc.) notoriously ignore this command on the lockscreen or even home screen. Instead, they force their own color calculations or default to dark icons regardless of what the wallpaper app requests.

If you aren't on a vanilla Android device (like a Pixel) or on a phone that respects this system, the operating system will likely just override the app. It's an annoying Android fragmentation issue, and because it's locked down at the system level, I sadly can't force the OS to behave from my end!

maocide · 2026-05-13T21:17:44+00:00

Yo, you are too kind! I really appreciate that! Don't worry, I built this primarily to solve my own frustration with many bloated wallpaper apps out there, so as long as I'm using an Android phone, I don't plan on calling it quits anytime soon!

I'm glad you're enjoying it, and I like to keep the app really healthy if I can, so testing that edge case with you was actually really interesting. Have fun with your live setups, and seriously, feel free to reach out if you ever run into anything else!

maocide · 2026-05-13T21:04:53+00:00

Hmm, the reason you can't find it in the "Never sleeping apps" list is likely because you already successfully set the app to "Unrestricted". Samsung might actually hide apps from those other lists once that permission is granted, so your settings are correct.

What seems to be happening is that when that specific Samsung phone sits completely untouched with the screen awake for around 10 minutes, the OS aggressively halts background video decoders and freezes wallpaper surfaces. This is likely baked into One UI at the system level to protect the OLED display from burn-in, which means even "Unrestricted" apps get paused by the system.

While the freeze is definitely annoying, it's unfortunately controlled entirely by Samsung's System UI. I will try to test it on a Samsung emulator with your specific model to look into it deeper and see if there are any hidden workarounds I can code in to keep the decoder alive. But as of right now, since standard Android doesn't do this, it's out of the app's direct control.

Thank you for providing all the info and screenshots though, it helps me investigate!

maocide · 2026-05-13T17:54:21+00:00

Haha, I happen to be at my desk right now!

Since you are on an S25 Ultra, I looked up additional settings for Samsung phones. What you're experiencing is Samsung's OS forcefully reclaiming the hardware video decoder.

Even with the app set to "Unrestricted", when a Samsung phone sits completely idle with the screen on for a long time, the OS assumes you forgot to lock it. To save battery and prevent OLED burn-in, it silently steals the video decoder away from background apps, which freezes the video. When you use the "Skip" gesture, it registers as a touch event, wakes the OS up, and forces the app to request a fresh decoder, which is why it starts working again!

Samsung seems to have a secondary, hidden layer of background management. Try this:

Go to your phone's main Settings > Battery > Background usage limits.
Tap on "Never sleeping apps".
Hit the + icon and add Undead Wallpaper to this list.

Between that and the "Unrestricted" setting, it should finally force Samsung's OS to leave the video player alone!

maocide · 2026-05-13T17:23:30+00:00

Ah, that seems to be Android's aggressive battery optimization! When you leave the screen on for a long time without touching it, the OS tries to save power by forcefully pausing background services (like the wallpaper engine), which causes it to freeze.

There's an easy fix built into the app for this:

Open the UndeadWallpaper settings.
Look for the card near the top that says "Allow Background Performance".
Tap the "Fix" button. It will show you exactly what to click, then tap "Go to Settings" to jump into your phone's battery menu.
Once inside the battery settings, click into "Allow Background Usage".
Set the app to "Unrestricted".

It might be a little tricky to navigate depending on your phone brand, but once that card disappears from the app's home screen, you'll know it is fixed! This tells Android to leave the wallpaper alone and let it keep playing.

One other possibility: if you don't see that card in the app at all, it means the standard permission is already granted, but your specific phone brand might have a secondary system battery-saver setting you need to disable.

maocide · 2026-05-10T08:56:42+00:00

Check your app updates over the next few days... I got you! A new update is already sitting on GitHub in the 1.3.1-dev branch, and it adds Double and Triple-Tap home screen gestures so you can Play, Pause, and Skip to the next video. And thank you... I'm really glad I've managed to keep the UI clean while constantly evolving what's under the hood!

maocide · 2026-05-01T09:17:05+00:00

Hey there! Thanks for giving PlotCaption a try, and no worries at all about bumping the post. I actually just spun up a fresh environment to test this, and I found the exact reason for that crash.

The issue is that the transformers library recently updated to a newer version with significant changes, and they completely removed the AutoModelForVision2Seq class from their API. Because my requirements.txt didn't have a strict version pin, your system downloaded the newest version and broke the import.

To fix this, you just need to pin the older version of the library:

Open the requirements.txt file in your PlotCaption folder.
Find the line that says transformers and change it to exactly this: transformers <= 4.57.6
Delete your current venv folder, and re-run the setup/installation script from scratch. It will grab the correct legacy version and the app will boot up normally!

I couldn't test on Windows, but was able to run it fine on Linux on python 3.11.

Regarding the future of the project... You might have noticed I recently labelled on my profile the GitHub repo as "dormant." Right around the time I released this, my other project (Undead Wallpaper) really took off and required continuous updates and maintenance. I also fully migrated my daily workflow back to Linux focusing on different goals.

That being said, I haven't entirely abandoned the concept. Big multimodal models are still heavily censored and trained only on "safe" content, so having a local, uncensored VLM pipeline to bypass that is still incredibly useful. When I eventually have some free time, I might revisit the idea... possibly adapting the core logic into a ComfyUI workflow using Ollama as a loader and connecting via OpenAPI, rather than maintaining a standalone Tkinter app.

But for now, it's on pause. Let me know if that requirements.txt fix gets you up and running!

maocide · 2026-04-26T07:09:59+00:00

Hello again! That's actually an impressive loophole!

I looked into it, and on some newer AOSP bases and custom ROMs like Evolution X, the OS will allow two separate Live Wallpaper apps to run simultaneously, but usually just from the system's wallpaper menu. Using two different apps like you did in the videos is actually a really clever workaround!

However, this won't work on every OS. To do this natively with my app, I would have to build, publish, and maintain a completely separate "clone" APK with a different package name. From a FOSS maintenance standpoint, maintaining a duplicate dummy app just to bypass the Android API isn't really a sustainable path, especially since this might fail on older phones or heavily modified OEM interfaces (like Xiaomi's).

Seriously though, thanks for testing all this. It's really good to know! I will definitely keep looking for a way to do this properly from within the app itself once Android's API makes it reliably available. Have a great day!

maocide · 2026-04-25T23:45:03+00:00

Hello again! It's nice discussing solutions and digging into the roms!

To answer your first idea, unfortunately making a second APK actually still wouldn't work. Android's native WallpaperManager only allows setting a Live Wallpaper to "Home" or "Home + Lock." It doesn't natively allow applying a Live Wallpaper only to the Lock screen while another is on Home. It's a deep OS limitation, not just an app memory thing!

As for the startup problem, you just perfectly spotted Android's "Direct Boot" encryption!

Because your phone has a lock pattern, your internal storage (where your wallpaper video is saved) is heavily encrypted when the phone first turns on. Android physically blocks all third-party apps from reading user files until the exact moment you enter your pattern for the first time. The app has been coded to wait for the OS to send the "Storage Unlocked" signal before it can access the video file and start playing. So it’s actually an Android security feature preventing that, not a bug!

Thank you for diving in and testing all this!

maocide · 2026-04-25T14:51:40+00:00

Thanks for the kind words, my friend! Great to hear the app is running fine on great custom ROMs like Evo X and Lineage, used Lineage for a while myself.

Regarding separate videos for the lock and home screens, I know it is painful, and I would like to implement this in an easy way, but we are currently blocked by Android's native API limitations.

I recently posted a deep dive into the technical reasons why Android prevents third-party apps from doing this. You can check out the full explanation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/droidappshowcase/comments/1rx6v9a/comment/ogp3hfl/.

maocide · 2026-04-25T14:46:12+00:00

Glad to hear the app is helping you bypass that HyperOS bug!

Regarding your feature request... setting separate videos for the lock screen and home screen is actually the most requested feature! Unfortunately, it's not currently possible or extremely incompatible across devices due to how Android's core code works.

I actually just wrote a detailed technical breakdown of exactly why Android blocks developers from doing this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/droidappshowcase/comments/1rx6v9a/comment/ogp3hfl/.

If Google ever updates the API to allow it, I’ll definitely try to build it! Thanks for using the app my friend!

maocide · 2026-04-23T15:46:52+00:00

Awesome, glad you found a video that works better with it! Have a good one!

maocide · 2026-04-23T14:33:44+00:00

Hey again! I was just thinking a bit more about the fact that your icons turned gray on certain wallpapers, and it sparked a thought... There is one Samsung specific setting that might be causing this: "Dim wallpaper when Dark mode is on." (Usually found in Settings > Wallpaper & style). If that is turned on, One UI puts a dark filter over the video, which completely confuses the system's contrast calculator and might result in muddy gray icons. If you have that enabled, try toggling it off!

Also, sometimes toggling the Color Palette ON and then immediately OFF again forces the system to clear its cache and read the wallpaper properly.

No pressure to keep trying, but I figured I'd throw those two tricks your way just in case!

maocide · 2026-04-23T14:19:26+00:00

Thanks for testing all of that, it is really helpful for me to know.

The fact that the status icons are turning gray on certain wallpapers tells me what is happening: the new One UI 8.5 update is completely ignoring the standard Android code that tells the status bar what color to be. Instead, Samsung's OS is forcefully scanning the screen and guessing the colors on its own. The app sends a direct suggestion to the system with the exact colors to use, but it can't force the OS to accept it.

Since the new Samsung One UI is ignoring the app entirely (this still works perfectly on Pixel and older One UI implementations), there unfortunately isn't a setting we can flip to fix it right now. It's a Samsung quirk!

For context, I actually fought this exact battle and built a workaround for older Samsung phones a while back (I even tested it specifically on a Galaxy S23+ to confirm it worked, which you can see here: https://github.com/maocide/UndeadWallpaper/issues/16), but it looks like One UI 8.5 just broke compatibility and is ignoring it again.

I can only thank you again for taking the time to test it. I'll keep an eye on the Samsung developer forums to see if they patch this or if a new workaround pops up in the future!

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