Windows 11's New Video Wallpapers vs. Gloomia: What Microsoft's DreamScene Revival Actually Does in 2026
Buried in recent Windows 11 Insider builds is a feature that hasn't existed in Windows in any official form since 2007: the ability to set a video file as your desktop background and have it loop, quietly, behind your icons and windows. It showed up first in Dev and Beta channel builds around September 2025, disappeared from some later builds, and as of this writing still has no official announcement, no confirmed name, and no release date. It's easy to miss unless you follow Windows Insider coverage closely, but it's a genuinely interesting move, because it's Microsoft testing the water on an idea that third-party apps, Gloomia included, have been building on for years.
This post lays out exactly what's confirmed about the feature, where it came from the first time around, and, since the obvious question is whether it makes dedicated live wallpaper apps redundant, what it can and can't actually do compared to what's already running on desktops today.
What Microsoft is actually testing
The feature has appeared behind a hidden ViveTool flag in Windows 11 Insider builds, first reported around build 26220.6690 on the Dev channel for version 25H2 and 26120.6690 on the Beta channel for version 24H2. Once enabled, it works through the existing Picture option on the Background settings page, under Settings, Personalization, Background, rather than as a separate new menu. Reports on which video formats it accepts vary a little by build, with .mp4 and .mkv confirmed most consistently and some builds also listing .mov, .wmv, .avi, .m4v, and .webm. Once a video is selected, Windows loops it continuously behind the desktop, including while apps or the Start menu are open, the same basic behavior third-party tools like Wallpaper Engine or Lively Wallpaper have offered for years.
What's just as notable is what hasn't happened: Microsoft has made no public announcement about it. Everything known comes from Insiders and outlets who spotted the flag and enabled it manually. By mid-January 2026, at least one report on a newer Beta build noted the flag had gone quiet again, with no sign of the feature in that particular build even though WebP image background support had shipped around the same time. That's a pretty normal pattern for Windows Insider testing, features get flighted, pulled back, adjusted, and sometimes shelved entirely, but it means there's no guarantee this reaches a stable Windows 11 release at all, let alone on any particular timeline.
This isn't Windows' first attempt
Anyone who used Windows Vista's Ultimate edition might recognize exactly what this is: a revival of DreamScene, a Vista Ultimate Extra that let you set a .wmv or .mpg video file as your desktop wallpaper. DreamScene previewed on February 13, 2007, reached its final release on September 25, 2007, and then simply didn't survive the jump to Windows 7. Ultimate Extras as a whole were quietly wound down, Windows 7 didn't carry any of them forward, and DreamScene never got an official successor for the better part of two decades. If the feature now being tested in Windows 11 ever does ship, it will be closing an almost twenty-year gap in Windows itself having any native answer to the idea of a moving desktop background.
That gap is exactly the space third-party live wallpaper apps have occupied the whole time. It's also worth noting this isn't unique to Windows: macOS has had its own separate Dynamic Desktop wallpapers, time-of-day-shifting photos, and animated Lock Screen scenes since Mojave, built and maintained entirely by Apple on its own schedule, unrelated to whatever Microsoft is doing with Windows 11. Neither operating system's built-in effort has ever tried to match what a dedicated app does, and that gap is worth looking at directly.
What a looping video file can and can't do
It's worth being precise about what's actually being tested here, because "video wallpaper" and "live wallpaper" get used loosely and they aren't the same thing. What's in these Insider builds is a way to point Windows at one video file and have it play on a loop as your background. It's a real, useful feature if it ships, but it's a single fixed clip, not a scene that responds to anything. There's no reported audio reactivity, no per-monitor scheduling across the day, no filter layer to adjust a scene without swapping the whole file, and nothing that pulls in outside data. It's also Windows-only by definition, since it's a Windows Settings feature, with nothing comparable confirmed for macOS or Linux.
That's the real difference between a video loop and what a purpose-built live wallpaper app renders. Gloomia's scenes are computed continuously rather than played back frame by frame from a fixed file, which is what makes wallpapers like its four audio-reactive wallpapers possible at all, since a pre-recorded video has no way to listen to whatever you're playing and shift its motion in response. It's also why features covered in Gloomia's Scheduler, Filters, and Photo Wallpaper mode exist as a layer on top of the wallpaper catalog rather than requiring a different video file for every variation you want. None of that is a knock on what Microsoft is testing, a simple video loop is a genuinely fine, lightweight option for a lot of people, it's just a different and much narrower thing than what a dedicated app is built to do.
The battery question, again
The other obvious concern with any moving background is whether it costs you battery life or GPU headroom, and it's the same concern that shadowed DreamScene back in 2007, when consumer graphics hardware was far weaker than it is now. Early hands-on reports on the current Windows 11 testing describe no meaningful increase in power draw during their checks, which lines up with how much more efficient video decoding hardware has gotten since Vista's era. That said, Microsoft hasn't published a final policy on whether playback automatically pauses on battery power, during battery saver, or behind full-screen apps, since the feature is still experimental and unfinished. Whatever Microsoft eventually ships, the underlying question, how much a moving background actually costs you day to day, and what a well-built app should be doing automatically to keep that cost low, is covered in more general terms in the battery and GPU impact guide.
Good news for third-party apps, not a threat to them
It's tempting to read any native OS feature as a competitive threat to the apps that came before it, but a hidden, unannounced, flag-gated feature that only replicates the most basic version of what dedicated apps already do isn't really that. If anything, a native video wallpaper option normalizes the whole idea for people who've never tried a live wallpaper before, the same way built-in screen recording or built-in screenshot annotation didn't kill the third-party tools that do those jobs more thoroughly, they just made more people comfortable with the basic concept before some of them went looking for something more capable. The honest, detailed comparison between a dedicated live wallpaper app and the biggest name in the category, Steam's own ecosystem, is worked out in the Wallpaper Engine comparison, and most of the same reasoning applies here: a first-party OS feature and a purpose-built catalog app are solving overlapping but genuinely different problems.
What actually changes for Gloomia users, if this ships at all
Practically, nothing changes unless you want it to. If Windows 11 eventually ships a stable, supported way to loop your own video as a background, that's a fine option for someone who already has a specific clip they want running behind their desktop and nothing more. It doesn't do anything to the wallpapers already installed through Gloomia, doesn't touch cross-platform support, which matters since the feature is Windows-only while Gloomia now ships real, signed builds on macOS and Linux too, and doesn't replicate any of the interactive or data-driven scenes in the catalog, from the audio-reactive set to the wallpapers that pull real astronomical data. A native video loop and a rendered, responsive scene are simply answering different requests, and there's no reason both can't exist on the same machine.
It's also worth remembering how early this still is. The feature has appeared and disappeared across multiple Insider builds over roughly a year with zero official confirmation from Microsoft, so there's a real chance it gets reworked substantially, delayed indefinitely, or quietly shelved the way plenty of other Insider-only experiments have been before. Nothing about it requires any action from anyone using a dedicated wallpaper app today, and nothing about it is likely to arrive as a finished, stable feature before the end of 2026 given the pace it's moved at so far.
The bottom line
Windows is testing a genuinely interesting, long-overdue feature: the return of a native way to loop a video as your desktop background, something it hasn't officially offered since Vista's DreamScene quietly disappeared after 2007. It's still experimental, hidden behind a feature flag, unannounced, and missing from some of the very builds that once had it. Even once it does ship, it will do one specific thing, play a fixed video file on a loop, which is a real but narrow slice of what a dedicated live wallpaper catalog covers. For now, and almost certainly for a while after this actually ships in a stable release, it's a complementary option sitting alongside dedicated apps rather than a replacement for them.
Frequently asked questions
Is Windows 11's native video wallpaper feature available right now?
Not for most people. It has only shown up hidden behind a ViveTool feature flag in Windows Insider Dev and Beta channel builds, starting around build 26220.6690 for 25H2 and 26120.6690 for 24H2. Microsoft has never made an official announcement about it, there's no confirmed release date, and later Beta builds in January 2026 reportedly dropped the flag entirely, so it may still change or disappear again before any stable release.
What is DreamScene, and why does this Windows 11 feature feel familiar?
DreamScene was a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra that let you set a .wmv or .mpg video as your desktop background. It previewed on February 13, 2007, reached final release on September 25, 2007, and was discontinued when Windows 7 shipped, with no successor for nearly two decades. The video wallpaper feature being tested in Windows 11 now is effectively the same idea revived, almost twenty years later.
What video formats will Windows 11's video wallpaper feature support?
In the Insider builds where it has appeared, it works through the existing Picture option on the Background settings page in Settings, Personalization, Background, and has been reported to accept .mp4 and .mkv files, with some builds also listing .mov, .wmv, .avi, .m4v, and .webm. Because it's still an unreleased, flag-gated feature, the exact final list could still change.
Does this mean apps like Gloomia will become pointless?
No. What's being tested is a way to loop one video file as a static background image replacement, nothing more. It has no audio reactivity, no real astronomical or NASA/JPL data, no scheduler to rotate scenes across the day, no visual filter layer, no Photo Wallpaper slideshow mode, and it's Windows-only. Gloomia covers all of that across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and would keep working exactly the same whether or not Microsoft ever ships this.
Will a similar feature come to macOS or Linux?
There's no indication of that. What's being tested is specific to Windows 11 Insider builds. macOS has its own separate Dynamic Desktop and animated Lock Screen wallpapers built by Apple, which are a different system with different rules, and there's no comparable native effort reported for Linux desktop environments.
Did Microsoft say why DreamScene was discontinued after Windows Vista?
Microsoft never gave a detailed public explanation, but DreamScene arrived in an era of much weaker consumer graphics hardware, and Ultimate Extras as a whole were quietly wound down and never carried forward past Windows 7. The current Insider testing reportedly shows no meaningful increase in power draw on modern hardware, but Microsoft hasn't published a final policy on pausing playback on battery power or during full-screen apps.