What is a dynamic wallpaper?

This is the oldest meaning and the one Apple uses. A single file bundles a series of photographs of the same scene, shot at different times of day, along with metadata describing where the sun sits in each frame. The system reads your clock and location and cross-fades between the frames as the day goes on.

Apple shipped this as Dynamic Desktop in macOS Mojave in 2018, and the files are HEIC containers rather than video. Nothing is animated. If you sit and watch one, you will not see motion, because the change happens over hours rather than seconds.

This is what most people picture, and on desktop operating systems it is usually the thing they cannot find. A video wallpaper plays an actual clip continuously behind your windows, so the motion is visible second to second rather than hour to hour.

macOS has moved partway here. Since Sonoma, Apple's aerial screen savers can carry onto the desktop and keep playing, which is real video motion. What macOS still has no setting for is pointing that feature at a file of your own, so a specific clip you shot, rendered, or downloaded needs a live wallpaper app. On Windows, Wallpaper Engine is the best-known tool for the same job, and it has never shipped a macOS version.

The loosest use of the term covers backgrounds that respond to something: the cursor position, audio playing on the device, the weather, or a physics simulation. These are rendered live rather than played back, which is why they are usually built as web pages, shaders, or small game scenes.

Android has supported this since 2010 and Windows tools lean into it heavily. It is rare on macOS, and it is worth knowing that this category costs the most power of the three, because something is being computed on every frame rather than decoded.

Mostly no. "Live wallpaper", "animated wallpaper", "moving wallpaper", and "moving background" are used interchangeably, and all of them point at type two above: visible motion behind your windows.

"Dynamic" is the one word that is genuinely ambiguous, because Apple claimed it for type one. So on a Mac, asking for a dynamic wallpaper may get you a set of still photos, while asking for a live or moving wallpaper gets you closer to video. That mismatch is the single most common source of confusion on this topic.

If you want the time-of-day effect on a Mac, it is already there: open System Settings, then Wallpaper, and choose from the Dynamic section. Nothing to install.

If you want your own video looping on the desktop, you need an app. Walyro does this on macOS 14.0 and later: import an MP4, MOV, or M4V file, preview how it sits behind the menu bar and dock, and send it to every display, the main display, or one chosen screen. Playback is muted by default and pauses in one click from the menu bar.