Sarabسراب

Animated wallpapers for Windows that rest when you work.

Sarab plays videos, GIFs, web pages and pictures behind your desktop icons, on one display or many. When an app covers the screen, the laptop runs on battery or the PC locks, the wallpaper freezes on its last frame, so it stays light on old PCs.

Download for Windows Source on GitHub

Windows 10 (1903 or later) and Windows 11. Free, GPL-3.0. Installs for your user, no administrator rights.

The Sarab window: two displays playing Dead Sea at dusk, and a library of wallpapers with thumbnails

What it does

Rests when you work

An app covering a display, two windows side by side, battery, energy saver, a locked screen, the screensaver, remote desktop, or other apps keeping the CPU busy: the wallpaper freezes in place, and the window says why. About 0.005 CPU cores while paused.

Every display

One wallpaper on all displays, a different one on each, or one stretched across them. Displays playing the same video stay on the same frame.

Your wallpapers

Videos, GIFs, pictures, web pages, web addresses and YouTube links. AVI, WMV and MPEG convert to MP4 when ffmpeg is installed. Programs can run behind the icons too, and rest with the rest.

Brings your library with it

Web, video and application wallpapers from Wallpaper Engine import with their settings. Sarab's own packages are plain zip files you can export and share.

Looks like Windows 11

Light and dark, Acrylic or Mica, a library with categories, tags, search and thumbnails. In ten languages, Arabic right to left.

Changes with you

Change wallpaper every few minutes, in order or at random, through one category. A screensaver of your own, mouse input for interactive pages, and the last frame kept as your Windows wallpaper when you quit.

Command line

Every action is a sarab command, so scripts and hotkey tools can drive it. The installer puts it on your PATH.

  • sarab set <file, folder or URL> [--display N]
  • sarab pause, play, next, volume 30
  • sarab screenshot C:\shots\desk.png
  • sarab status --json for scripts
> sarab set C:\Wallpapers\dunes.mp4
> sarab status
Sarab 0.0.7 (pid 7428)
Display 1  1920x1080  dunes (video)  Playing
Display 2  1920x1080  dunes (video)  Resting: on battery

Install

  1. Download Sarab_<version>_x64-setup.exe from the latest release.
  2. Run it. It installs for your user only and asks for a language. It downloads the WebView2 runtime if the PC lacks it (Windows 11 always has it).
  3. SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher, because the installer is not code-signed yet. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

Sarab checks for updates every few hours and installs one only when you choose Update now, after checking its signature.