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Show HN: MacOS Live Screensaver – A screensaver that plays live video streams

56 pointsposted 4 days ago

40 Comments

cwizou

18 hours ago

That's super cool, congrats on releasing it ! It's a feature that some people periodically ask me to add in Aerial, but I never got to it. Piping from yt-dlp to AVFoundation is definitely the way to go.

I was gonna warn you about a bug in macOS 15+ where your screensaver stays around after you go back to the desktop, but for some reason your code seems to avoid that issue. I'm not quite sure how, as you don't hook stopAnimation or any event apart from the deinit. But it works, so, massive kudos, I'll have to try and understand why !

hauxir

18 hours ago

interesting you pointed that out because i ran into that exact problem!

look at the animateoneframe function, there's the workaround

cwizou

17 hours ago

So fyi, the way you hook it there is what makes the preview flicker in System Settings.

You check if the screen is locked, and if not, kill the host. But screen is not locked in System Settings. So basically, you're killing the host process every 2 seconds (and macOS, at least in Tahoe, restarts it, it doesn't in previous macOS versions).

That's also what causes your issues with "Options" not working (because you killed the instance that was linked to that button). The way we workaround it usually is to hook a system event.

You can check https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal

Look for handleWillStopNotification and com.apple.screensaver.willstop

cwizou

18 hours ago

Ha, you do the exit trick too then, I just missed it.

FYI that works 99% of the time, but for some people it sometimes crashes (because we exit our host container - legacyScreenSaver.appex - and sometimes if you do it at a wrong time things just hang).

its-kostya

21 hours ago

> Disclaimer: This project was entirely vibe-coded. I've never written Swift before in my life

Something I've wondered - but not had much empirical evidence for - is if entirely vibe-coded projects are difficult to maintain. I, too, don't know swift so I cannot look over the codebase to gauge this. I am curious if any swift savants out there can weigh in.

Furthermore, I will follow the project and keep an eye out for patches/discussions and try to discern any friction and/or loss in momentum because it is difficult to work with (e.g. more bug/feature tickets than PRs, etc.). I am aware it might fizzle out on its own, irrespective of the quality of the codebase. This will be a curious exercise for me. This may be my first empirical data on this topic - sadly on vibe-coded & maintainability, not the project itself.

hauxir

21 hours ago

They most definitely are.

However this project is so simple it's more akin to a script. Really not that hard to grasp despite not knowing swift.

Also vibe coded an android tv version and used this codebase as input ;)

https://github.com/hauxir/androidtv-live-screensaver

runjake

19 hours ago

Indeed I was able to read through it's 555 lines in about 4-5 minutes. Nothing seems too ghastly -- it's a pretty good vibe coding job.

diob

18 hours ago

I think they're just as maintainable as any other legacy app you might encounter. As in, it can be hard. But it's doable. And it depends on the team that made it (AI + the human).

Someone

19 hours ago

> is if entirely vibe-coded projects are difficult to maintain

Vibe coding is too “Hail Mary” to me, but if you’re into it, I would think the best way to do that is by giving a LLM the git history of the project with each commit contain the prompt that created it and, if a human tweaked things, requiring that human to provide a good commit comment.

Then, you could give a LLM the git repo, instructions on what change you want to see, and have it create the next commit.

dylan604

18 hours ago

> requiring that human to provide a good commit comment.

Is this enough? Personally, I have a what very well may be a bad habit of mine that doesn't necessarily check git commit messages. When I'm working in a code base, I just never think about scrolling through those hoping to find where this bit of code was changed. I'd much rather have comments in the code itself. It seems better to me to save the maintainer time and effort. Maybe I've just taken too seriously the idea of "assume the maintainer after you will be a serial killer that knows where you live. don't make them angry by being lazy"

grimgrin

19 hours ago

this is kinda inline with what you're asking i think?

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/

for me it's working on a thing, and then linting, type checking, running tests. and even then thoughtfulness still required

reaperducer

21 hours ago

I wonder if certain languages are easier to vibe code than others.

My supposition is that the better documented a language, the easier it would be for the LLMs.

Or is it the opposite: The more obtuse a language, the more StackOverflow questions, the easier it is for LLMs to work with.

its-kostya

20 hours ago

I've had success vibe-coding things that, I would imagine, make up more of the training dataset - more common. When I try to do more specific Linux systems programming it is pretty trash, especially with newer languages.

Lucian6

12 hours ago

Interesting approach using AVFoundation for the video playback. I've worked with streaming video on macOS and found that AVPlayer can be quite memory-hungry when handling multiple streams. Have you considered using VLCKit instead? In our testing, VLCKit used about 40% less memory and handled network interruptions more gracefully.

One potential enhancement would be to add support for adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH). Most live streams nowadays offer multiple quality levels, and automatically switching based on available bandwidth/CPU makes a big difference in reliability. The AVPlayerItem.preferredPeakBitRate property gives you basic control, but implementing a full ABR solution with VLCKit gives much finer-grained control over quality transitions.

Also curious about your strategy for handling screen sleep/wake cycles. We found that AVPlayer instances sometimes get stuck in a bad state after sleep, requiring a full teardown and reinit. Using notification observers for NSWorkspaceDidWakeNotification helped catch and recover from these cases.

losthobbies

21 hours ago

I will be streaming a certain watering hole in Namibia.

aerostable_slug

18 hours ago

Nice work!

Excellent, advertising-free live streams to choose from here:

https://www.youtube.com/@MontereyBayAquarium/streams

I often turn on the kelp forest (sound muted) as a pleasing backdrop on my living room TV, but they're all pretty neat.

Lammy

12 hours ago

Getting my daily dose of Kensington Ave, Philadelphia or Skid Row, Los Angeles every time I come back from the restroom:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8mIPhfrMug

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpcdnZhztI

grimgrin

20 hours ago

this is cool. i love shit like this

idk if any of y'all ever used https://satelliteeyes.tomtaylor.co.uk/ but I was a big fan. such that i now have my own process of keeping my wallpaper updated w/ various city webcams. throw in some noise/desaturation and you've got an _aesthetic_

anyway, this is about a screensaver not a wallpaper and i think there is cool potential with video streams as screensavers

rollcat

21 hours ago

AVFoundation is pretty cool. You can whip out a simple audio/video player in a couple dozen lines of code. It was one of my first macOS apps/prototypes.

MontagFTB

21 hours ago

How’d they get Claude listed as one of the contributors? Is that due to changes coming in to the repo from a Claude/github integration?

hauxir

21 hours ago

it's just claude code commiting and pushing for me because i'm lazy

threecheese

19 hours ago

Not lazy! This should be a requirement, so future “us” can discern authorship - just like any developer.

hrimfaxi

19 hours ago

It will probably go the opposite way though in the future. People will list when AI wasn't used in the loop, like how "sent from my iphone" was both a status signal and a request for leniency when it comes to spellcheck.

hackernewds

17 hours ago

if you read the article, it says it is entirely vibecoded

t1234s

19 hours ago

Does anyone still use screensavers? I have set my machines to turn off the screen as soon as that was an available option.

dylan604

17 hours ago

It's still a habit of mine. I have 2 external monitors on my desk connected to my laptop. One of them is a bit older LCD, but still functions well for purpose. It has a fun little quirk where when it first turns on there are a few vertical lines of a solid color until it has "warmed up" and the lines disappear after a few minutes. By using a screen saver when I get up and lock the screen, I don't have to wait for that screen to warm back up. At night, it does eventually turn off the screen saver after my timeout, but at least it's not every time I return to the desk.

Also, from a time long ago in a galaxy far away where we had production CRTs that were color calibrated, we would not turn them off either. They had a saver mode as well by running a not quite black signal to them, but not enough to burn in phosphors. It was even meant to "even" out some of them.

So because I'm that old that has used CRTs for such a long part of my life, screen savers will always be just part of the routine.