Any video or image on your desktop, plus a clock widget that looks designed rather than bolted on. One process, no browser engine, no launcher, no account.
Every screenshot here is a real capture from a 2560x1600 display at 150% scaling. Nothing is mocked up or retouched. The wallpapers are the ones shipped in FeatherWall's own gallery, so you can reproduce any of them in about four clicks.
That is a real screen recording, not a mockup: a 4000x2250 clip decoding on the desktop with the clock ticking over it, while the desktop stays fully usable underneath.
Big Buck Bunny, (c) copyright 2008 Blender Foundation, peach.blender.org, CC BY 3.0.
Nine anchor positions, any installed typeface, any size and colour, optional seconds, optional date, optional hairline rule. The font picker renders each family in its own face while you are scrolling it.
| Bahnschrift Light, bottom left, with seconds | Cascadia Mono, top right |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Georgia, centred |
|---|
 |
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (NASA and the European Space Agency, public domain). The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (NASA, public domain). Alone in the unspoilt wilderness, David Marcu, CC0. Full credits in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
The panel opens with a live miniature of the clock. It is drawn by the same renderer that paints your desktop, so the preview cannot drift from the real thing. It follows your Windows light and dark setting too.
| Clock | Wallpaper | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
These are measurements, not estimates. Each row is 25 one-second samples on a running instance, with the pause state checked before and after the window so a silently paused wallpaper could never be recorded as a cheap one. The GPU column that used to sit here carried no stated method and has been fully re-measured; what follows replaces it.
Test rig: Windows 11 Pro 26200 · Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, 24 logical cores · 63 GB RAM · Intel Arc integrated graphics driving the display, NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop idle · 2560x1600 at 240 Hz, 150 % scaling · .NET 10 Release build, single monitor.
Test media: Hubble Ultra Deep Field, 6200x6200 JPEG, public domain. For video, a 3840x2160 H.264 clip at 60 fps and 12 Mbps, plus a 1920x1080 downscale of the same clip, so the two video rows differ only in resolution.
| State | CPU (whole machine) | CPU (one core) | Memory (working set) | Graphics memory | Busiest GPU engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Still image | 0.06 % | 1.4 % | 156 MB | 44 MB | 0.1 % (3D) |
| Video, auto-paused | 0.004 % | 0.1 % | 309 MB | 269 MB | 0 % (no video engine work) |
| Video, 1080p60 playing | 0.79 % | 19 % | 212 MB | 122 MB | 29.4 % (video processing) |
| Video, 4K60 playing | 0.84 % | 20 % | 248 MB | 234 MB | 41.8 % (video processing) |
The first CPU column is what Task Manager shows you. The second is the same measurement divided by one core instead of twenty-four, because a sub-1 % figure on a machine this wide deserves the honest denominator next to it.
This runs on the integrated GPU, not the discrete one. Every GPU number above belongs to the
Intel Arc integrated graphics. nvidia-smi lists no FeatherWall process on the RTX 5090, which
sat at 0 % utilisation and 287 MiB of its 24463 MiB throughout. That is not an accident: the
compositor lives on whichever adapter drives the display, so the wallpaper stays there and never
competes with a game on the discrete card. On a desktop whose only GPU is discrete, these numbers
would land on that card instead.
Read the GPU column carefully. Windows reports GPU work per engine, not as one number, and those percentages do not add up to a total. The table shows the busiest single engine, which is roughly what Task Manager displays. At 4K60 the video decode engine was also at 17.9 % and 3D at 7.6 %; summing them to 67 % would be meaningless.
Graphics memory is not the working set, and it is not VRAM. It is a separate allocation, and dedicated VRAM reads 0 MB on every row because integrated graphics have no memory of their own and borrow system RAM instead. Add the two memory columns for the honest total: a 4K60 wallpaper costs roughly 480 MB of system memory, not 248 MB. The old version of this table listed only the working set, which undersold the real footprint by about half.
Frame rate costs as much as resolution. Both video rows are 60 fps. Dropping the same clip from 4K to 1080p saved 12 points on the video processing engine and 112 MB of graphics memory, but halving the frame rate is the other dial and it is just as effective. A 24 fps 4K clip measured 22.5 % on that engine, roughly half the 60 fps figure.
Pausing costs nothing to run, but it does not give the memory back. Put a fullscreen app in front, lock the session, connect over RDP or switch on battery saver, and playback stops rather than throttling: 0.004 % CPU and no video engine activity at all. The buffers stay allocated so resuming is instant, which makes paused the highest-memory row in the table. That is the honest shape of it, and it is the state the wallpaper is in whenever you are actually gaming.
It also stays where it starts. Memory and threads were flat across 30 consecutive full re-applies, which is the path a laptop hits every time it docks or changes monitors: 250 MB to 278 MB, 56 threads to 63. That used to go very differently, and the honest notes below explain what changed.
On battery specifically: system draw sat at 31 to 33 W across all three states on this laptop, which is within noise for isolating a single process. FeatherWall's share is not separable from that, so there is no watts figure here. The pause behaviour above is the honest version of that claim.
Wallpaper engines have a habit of being enormous. Several processes, mixed runtimes, an embedded browser to draw a looping MP4, a launcher, an account, a storefront. Then Windows 11 24H2 changed how the desktop is composed and a lot of them started painting black rectangles.
FeatherWall is the other bet.
One process and one runtime. Raw Win32, Direct3D 11 and DirectComposition, with WinRT MediaPlayer
in frame-server mode for decoding. No WPF, no WinUI, no WebView2, no CEF, no player subprocess.
featherwall.exe is the entire application.
It is built for the current Windows desktop. FeatherWall detects and supports both desktop
topologies, the classic WorkerW layout and the Windows 11 24H2+ raised desktop where Progman
opts out of GDI redirection, and it renders through DirectComposition, the same path the shell
itself uses. docs/architecture.md covers that properly and is the most
interesting file in the repository.
There is no account, no telemetry and no network traffic unless you ask for it. The only time FeatherWall reaches the internet is when you click a gallery item to download it.
Windows 10 1809 or newer. Grab the release, or build it yourself.
Take featherwall-v0.1.0-win-x64.zip from the
latest release. It unzips to a
single featherwall.exe, so there is no installer and nothing to uninstall. Run it and you are
done.
You need the .NET 10 desktop runtime, which is a much smaller download than the SDK. Keeping the build framework-dependent is what holds the release to 7 MB instead of shipping a copy of .NET with it.
Verify the download if you like:
Get-FileHash .\featherwall-v0.1.0-win-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256
# 300f59a28269fc2fc034ad86ee64d6fd320cd17f8c2e7a31c789bcc28844dfd7This needs the .NET 10 SDK rather than just the runtime.
git clone https://github.com/RitvikDayal/featherwall
cd featherwall
dotnet build -c Release
.\src\FeatherWall\bin\Release\net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0\featherwall.exeA feather appears in your tray. Right-click it and pick Set wallpaper for your own file, or Gallery to pull something public domain. Double-click the tray icon for the settings panel.
| Flag | Does |
|---|---|
--settings |
Opens the settings panel |
--diag |
Prints the detected desktop topology and monitor layout |
--exit |
Stops the running instance |
Releases are unsigned today, and a program that reaches into shell windows is exactly the shape security heuristics dislike. Build from source, or choose More info then Run anyway. Code signing through SignPath Foundation is on the roadmap.
Video wallpapers in MP4 and H.264 out of the box, plus MOV, AVI, WMV and WebM. Looping happens inside the media pipeline so there is no seam, and playback is muted by default and hardware decoded. Images cover PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF and animated GIF.
The clock is the part people notice. Large light-weight time, a hairline rule, a small dimmed date underneath. It takes any installed font at any size, sits at any of nine anchors, does 12 or 24 hour with optional seconds, and has adjustable colour, opacity and shadow. It is click-through by construction, so it never gets in the way of your desktop icons.
Everything else: per-monitor wallpapers, Fill, Fit and Stretch modes, DPI-aware rendering, a full tray menu, JSON config for anything the UI does not expose, and auto-pause on fullscreen apps, session lock, remote desktop and battery saver. If explorer.exe restarts or the shell rebuilds the wallpaper layer, FeatherWall re-attaches itself, and it puts your original wallpaper back when it exits.
Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay all explicitly prohibit wallpaper apps in their terms, so FeatherWall does not touch them. The gallery is a static manifest of genuinely public domain and CC0 media from NASA and Wikimedia Commons, downloaded straight from the source when you click it. No API key, no backend, no grey area.
8 of the 11 entries carry a SHA-1 that gets verified after download, and a mismatch is a hard failure. The other three, all NASA-hosted videos, are unpinned today and download without verification. That is issue #1 and it is a good first contribution.
The tray menu and settings panel cover the common cases. Everything lives in
%APPDATA%\FeatherWall\config.json:
{
"wallpapers": [{ "monitor": "*", "path": "C:\\wallpapers\\aurora.webm" }],
"fit": "Fill",
"muteVideo": true,
"volume": 0.3,
"clock": {
"enabled": true,
"anchor": "TopCenter",
"marginX": 48,
"marginY": 96,
"twentyFourHour": true,
"showSeconds": false,
"showDate": true,
"separator": true,
"fontSize": 150,
"fontFamily": "Segoe UI Light",
"color": "#F0FFFFFF",
"shadow": true
},
"pause": { "onFullscreen": true, "onBatterySaver": true, "onRemoteSession": true }
}monitor takes a device name such as \\.\DISPLAY1, or "*" for all of them. Logs are written to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\FeatherWall\featherwall.log.
FeatherWall decodes through the OS media pipeline, so H.264 and MP4 work everywhere. HEVC needs the paid HEVC Video Extensions, and VP9 and AV1 need the free extensions from the Microsoft Store. Gallery entries are labelled when they need one.
Things that are true and worth saying out loud.
CPU while a video plays is about 1 % of the machine, which is about 24 % of a single core. That is the cost of copying every decoded frame onto the composition surface and presenting it, and it is not zero. A still image is free, and auto-pause means the video is not running most of the time anyway, but the number is the number.
The re-apply leak is fixed, and it was bad. Until recently every full re-apply, which includes
display changes, monitor hot-plug and explorer restarts, stranded roughly 27 threads and 24 MB
permanently. A disposed WinRT MediaPlayer holds onto its Media Foundation worker threads until
the runtime collects it, because projected child objects keep COM references that the player's own
Dispose cannot release. A laptop that docked a few times a day would drift past 500 MB and 129
threads. The pipeline is now reclaimed explicitly at teardown, and 30 back-to-back re-applies move
memory by under 30 MB.
Quitting used to hang. SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER) with SPIF_SENDCHANGE
broadcasts to every top-level window and waits for each one to answer, and it was running on the UI
thread during shutdown. One busy application that was not pumping messages and featherwall.exe
would never exit. It now writes the setting without the blocking broadcast and notifies other
applications asynchronously.
Some things have not been verified on real hardware: multi-monitor layouts, the classic WorkerW
topology (the development machine is a 24H2+ raised desktop), and recovery from an explorer.exe
restart. Those code paths exist and are unit-tested where unit tests can reach, but nobody has
exercised them on hardware yet. If you have a second monitor or a Windows 10 machine, that is the
single most useful thing you could contribute.
Contributions are welcome, and there is a fair amount of low-hanging fruit. Start with the good first issue label, or the help wanted label if you have hardware this project does not.
CONTRIBUTING.md has the ground rules. The short version: dotnet test should be
green before you open a pull request, which takes under a second for the 54 tests currently in the
suite, and anything touching interop or rendering needs to say which desktop topology you tested
it on. Please also read the Code of Conduct.
Security issues go through SECURITY.md rather than the public tracker.
Slideshows and playlists, more widgets such as battery and now-playing, and a drag-to-position
edit mode for the clock. On the engine side: an IMFMediaEngine backend, NativeAOT single-file
publishing, and an optional mpv backend for codecs Media Foundation will not touch. On the release
side: a winget package, signed builds and an ARM64 CI leg.
MIT. Gallery media is public domain or CC0 and documented per entry in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.