Aerials Screensaver for Linux

Download or stream Aerials on selectable quality with xscreensaver.

Dependency

• mplayer
• python
• xscreensaver

Download all Screensavers

Create a new folder to which you want to download the files and put the file aerial_loader.py there.

You can choose in which quality you want to download in aerial_loader.py

    video_quality={0: "url-1080-H264",
                    1: "url-1080-SDR",
                    2: "url-1080-HDR",
                    3: "url-4K-SDR",
                    4: "url-4K-HDR"}
    # used quality for download
    download_video_quality=3
    # used quality for stream
    stream_video_quality=1

Configure xscreensaver

Copy files aerials_screensaver_local & aerials_screensaver_streaming into /usr/lib/xscreensaver and make them executable (chmod +x).

Set the path to directory in which you have executed aerial_loader.py in the files aerials_screensaver_local & aerials_screensaver_streaming.

Now you need to announce the new screensavers in .xscreensaver under programs

programs:                                     \
"AerialsScreensaver"  aerials_screensaver_local      \n\
"AerialsStream"       aerials_screensaver_streaming  \n\

You can also disable downloading video files in aerial_loader.py by setting Download_Screensaver to False.

KDE

You need to start ksmserver with --no-lockscreen it will else conflict with xscreensaver.

mv /usr/bin/ksmserver /usr/bin/ksmserver-orig

Create a new file vim /usr/bin/ksmserver

#!/bin/sh
ksmserver-orig --no-lockscreen

chmod +x /usr/bin/ksmserver

This 'fix' has to be repeated when ksmserver is updated.

Knonw issues

• It is theoretically possible that in a multi monitor setup the screensavers become asynchronous, should be fixed the next time you run it.
• Xscreensaver seems to have a problem terminating mediaplayers other than mplayer. What leads to the situation that the playback processes remain active after closing the screensaver.
• When downloading, each video is first written fully to RAM before being written to disk. Note this in low RAM scenarios.