Pro Tip: Bring your Mac to life with a custom video screen saver

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Now you can get any video you like up on your Mac's screen saver.
Now you can get any video you like up on your Mac's screen saver.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bugIf you’re enamored of the beautiful aerial screen savers on your new Apple TV and want to do something similar on your Mac, you’re in luck.

SaveHollywood is a screen saver module that will work on any Mac running OS X 10.8 or later, and it lets you play any movie you want when your Mac enters screen saver mode.

Here’s how to get it set up.

Note: You can get the actual screen savers over to your Mac using our earlier trick, too.

Head on over to the SaveHollywood site and download the module there. You’ll get a .dmg file – simply double click to mount the disk image. Open that virtual disc and double click on the SaveHollywood.saver. This will install the screen saver and take you to the appropriate System Preferences pane.

Start your new screensaver here.
Start your new screensaver here.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Once there, click on the SaveHollywood module in the left hand pane to see a preview. Click on the Screen Saver Options button and then click on the Plus button at the top of the slide-down screen. Choose a movie from your Mac you want to make your screen saver from using the typical file dialog. You can play movies shot with your iPhone or iPad, movie trailers you download from the internet, training materials you’ve created, and more.

You can add more than one movie.
You can add more than one movie.
Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

If you add more than one video, click and drag the videos around in the list to create your preferred playing order. If you like, you can also add a whole folder of videos in the same way.

So many options!
So many options!

Options include a Play in random order checkbox, and you can tell SaveHollywood to start playing from the last position played, so that you’ll always begin the video from where you last left off. You can size the videos to fit the screen, fill the scree, or play in actual size — helpful if you have older, lower resolution videos to play. You can draw a border around the video and even show the title and copyright of each video, if it’s part of the file itself.

You can even specify where the audio plays if you have a secondary display, checking the Play only on main display checkbox to make sure you don’t get funky mismatched audio streams, and you can tell Save Hollywood to only play videos as a screen saver on your main display, if that works for you.

Now you’ve got a lovely movie-based screen saver that will keep you entertained after your display goes into screen saver mode. Set up a hot corner and test it out today!

Add some hot corners.
Add some hot corners.

Via: OS X Daily

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