Desktop Movie plays videos as video wallpapers on the desktop

Remember Dreamscene, the Windows Vista Ultimate extra that allowed you to use videos as the desktop background instead of static images?

It never really took off and Microsoft removed it more or less quickly from future versions of the Windows operating system (even though you could re-enable it with programs).

Desktop Movie is a free program for the Windows operating system that brings Dreamscene back. Unlike Dreamscene, it is not limited to Windows Vista Ultimate or the video formats that Vista's Dreamscene supported.

Apart from that, it ships with a number of extra features that you may find very useful.

The program itself is portable and can be run from any location on the system. It will make modifications to the Windows Registry on first start if the system is Windows 8 or 10 which enables the overlay mixer for all applications again on those systems.

The program opens a file browser on consecutive visits that you use to pick a supported video file from the system.

Once you have made that selection, it begins to play the video automatically by replacing the current desktop wallpaper with it.

A right-click on the program icon in the system tray area displays a list of options that give you control over certain features.

You may use it to change the monitor the video is played on for instance, or change the format from letterbox to stretched or cropped instead.

You may add videos to a playlist which are then played one after the other or shuffled if you select that option. This is quite useful especially when you are selecting short playing video files as you would otherwise have to load another video frequently if you want videos to play continuously on the desktop.

Playlist files can be saved and loaded again instead of selecting an individual video file on start or by enabling the restore playlist option.

There is also an option to open a video control window which enables you to change the volume of the video file and to use a slider to move forward or backward.

Verdict

Desktop Movie suffers from the same issue that Microsoft's Dreamscene Vista extra suffered from: there are barely any use cases where one would want to use it.

While it looks impressive and certainly has a wow-effect when you play a video on the screen this way, as it is fully borderless, it is simpler to run a media player in full screen instead which offers nearly the same experience especially since most offer a fullscreen mode as well (VLC Media Player does for example).