ScreenPlay v0.15 Released!

Published on Jul 16, 2023 by Elias Steurer | Kelteseth

ScreenPlay is an Open-Source Live Wallpaper and Widgets app for Windows & macOS (and soon Linux) written in modern C++/Qt/QML and is in active development since early 2017 on Gitlab.
You can download ScreenPlay via Steam for free!

Window Navigation Updates

ScreenPlay now adapts to the light and dark theme of the system. It also now features a new quick action menu on the top right for (left to right) muting, pausing, closing all wallpaper and wallpaper settings.


Updated to latest Qt 6.5.1

Before we bore you with all the technical detail about the changes from Qt5 to Qt6, it is mostly about enabling some important features you can see below like Apple silicon and mp4 support. This also brings always a good amount of bugfixes.

Playback Of H.264 (.mp4) Content

Qt6.2 ships with a completely revamped multimedia leveraging modern Windows, Linux and OSX APIs resulting in better performance and codec support. We now support h.264 on Windows and OSX. Even h.265 is supported when it is bought via the Windows App store. Open Source codecs are always recommended to push Open Source software.

One Click Import And Export

Sharing content just got a hole lot easier! You can simply now right click to export. This will export an .screenplay file, that contains all associated project files. This uses 7zip internally to compress the data, that means it can also be opened with regular 7zip. Importing works also just by dropping a .screenplay filo onto ScreenPlay.

Apple Silicon M1 and M2

Qt6 support brings us also free Apple Silicon support! This includes working Universal binary support, so now all ScreenPlay.app, ScreenPlayWallpaper.app, and ScreenPlayWidget.app will work with both Intel and Apple Silicon at full speed.

Improved SysInfo API

The SysInfo API got a new IP-Address feature to list your public and private IP addresses. This will work for IPv4 and IPv6! For this we ping the free icanhazip.com service.


New Weather Forecast API

Another great addition to ScreenPlays expanding feature set is the new Weather API. It is build around open-meteo.com, that will provide a detailed 7 day forecast. We now additionally include Weather Icons for nice set of matching icons.


Standalone Installer: None Steam (Workshop) Version

ScreenPlay can now be independently be downloaded. This includes a nice Qt IFW based installer. Note: This version does not include the Steam Workshop Plugin. You can still create Wallpaper via the Create tab or import any .screenplay file.

Download Standalone Installer (Windows only)

All other features and fixes:

  • Pack macos ScreenPlay into a single executable ScreenPlay.app
  • Fix Windows fractional wallpaper scaling.
  • Fix Windows wallpaper fade in calculation. We know correctly calculate the default Windows wallpaper position for nice fade-in animations.
  • Add explicit quit and minimize warning dialog.
  • Fix macos Wallpaper showing app icon in dock.
  • Deprecate QtMaintanance based Qt setup. We now use aqt directly and thus no longer require a Qt account. If you are using VSCode you can simply install the C/C++ and CMake Tools with the newly added CMakePresets.json. QtCreator still has some issues, see my bugreport here.
  • Add working linux CI. This also includes a working KDE Wallpaper version that is not yet 100% ready.
  • Add first batch of default content that will ship by default with the next ScreenPlay version.
  • Update steamSDK to 1.56
  • Fix widget and wallpaper live reloading
  • Fix widget not propagating input
  • Update to ffmpeg 6.0
  • Change to shorter SPDX license in header files
  • Add moc include for faster compile times
  • Remove QApplication in favor of QGuiApplication to fix dark window border on Windows
  • Add tasks.json for things like setup.py so it can be started from VSCode gui
  • Refactor linux X11 support: Rename LinuxWindow to LinuxX11Window, for kde we use a desktop wallpaper plugin and for Wayland we need something else entirely.
  • Add audio icon if installed wallpaper contains audio

Direct (No Steam Workshop) download (Windows x64)

This is the standalone ScreenPlay version. If you wish to have Steam Workshop support with hundrets of wallpapers please download ScreenPlay from Steam.

Portable ScreenPlay zip sha256 checksum

ScreenPlay Is Open Source Software

Everyone can contribute with code, design, documentation or translation. If you have questions about contributing do not hesitate to ask in the Forum or Discord. Here are some ways you can contribute: