wayab

wayab(wayland animated background) allows user to set animated background on Linux(wayland).

Features

• low CPU costs. Unlike oguri which change the background by sending requests via wayland-protocols, wayab use dmabuf to save CPU costs.
• configurable frame rate
• multi-monitor support

Dependencies

• wayland-client
• wayland-egl
• wayland-protocols
  • stable/xdg-shell/xdg-shell.xml
  • unstable/xdg-output/xdg-output-unstable-v1.xml (for output name)
  • wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1.xml (for the background role and output size)
• cairo and cairo-gl (the aur/cairo-glesv3-bin package if you use Arch)
• also need your PC to support EGL and GLESv2

Build

use cmake

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Usage

1. Extract all frames from your source(gif for example), usually using imagemagick's convert command

convert -coalesce ./input.gif out%04d.png

if you have a viedeo as input, you can use ffmpeg to do similar work.

2. run following command

wayab -f $fps -o $config

• -h show help message
• -f set fps
• -o output config, in format: <output>:<path>:<resize>:<anchor>
  • output is the output name
  • path is the abs path which contains all frames(need to be PNG) of some animated pictures
  • resize could be none/fill/fit/stretch/tile
  • anchor is a coordinate in range (0.0,0.0) to (1.0,1.0)
    • 0.0,0.0 means left-top
    • 1.0,0.0 means right-top
    • 1.0,1.0 means right-bottom
    • 0.0,1.0 means left-bottom
    • 0.5,0.5 means center
    • ..

for example, if you have two directory for two gifs, /tmp/a and /tmp/b, and you have two output eDP-1 and DP-2.

wayab -f 10 -o eDP-1:/tmp/a:none:0.5,0.5 -o DP-2:/tmp/b:fill:0.5,1.0

means, you set the fps to 10, and set /tmp/a as eDP-1's background, no resize will be applied and aligned to center. And /tmp/b as DP-2's background, it will be resized to fill the output and aligned to center-bottom.

Example

wayab_example.mp4

image from 1041uuu

Update

cairo dropped opengl backend support since 1.17.8, to make wayab work, we should use cairo 1.17.4 which still provide cairo-gl.

just download the prebuilt version of cairo from aur/cairo-glesv3-bin.

then use following command with cmake

cmake -DCairo_ROOT=/path/to/prebuilt/root ..

Update 2024/03/11

this repo vendored libcairo 1.17.4, so just

git submodule --init

after clone or add --recursive when getting this repo