Pick a wallpaper
The quick path from opening Motion to a wallpaper on your desktop. Each part has its own page with the details.
Open Motion Player
Open Motion Player from your app menu (on Windows, the Start menu, or Open Motion Player in the tray). The first time, it walks you through a few short steps: pick a scene, where it shows (with more than one screen), and how it behaves. After that it opens on Home.
Home has two parts:
- On your desktop: a card for each screen, with what it shows now.
- Library: every scene you have, as a tile.
The rail on the left goes between Home, Screens, Playlists, Motion Hub, Studio and, at the foot, Settings.
Put a scene on your desktop
- Click a scene in the library. It opens and plays in the window, so you can see it before you use it. Your desktop doesn't change yet.
- Under Show on, pick where it goes. With one screen there's only Your screen. With more, pick a screen, Same on every screen, or One across all screens for one scene drawn as one big picture over all of them.
- Click Use as wallpaper. The button changes to say where it's on now.
Or, from a screen's card on Home, click Change. The library then says which screen it's choosing for, and the scene you click goes straight onto it.
Change how it looks
Most scenes have settings of their own: colours, speed, how busy it is. They're on the right when you open a scene, under Its settings on your screen. Change one and the preview follows; the desktop follows a moment later. Reset puts them back as they came.
With more than one screen, each screen keeps its own settings for each scene. See The library.
More than one screen
Every screen can have its own scene, they can all show the same one, or one scene can span them all. The Screens page shows your screens as they're laid out, and you can drag scenes onto them. See Screens.
Change scene on its own
A playlist goes through scenes every few minutes, or by the time of day: a calm one at night, a brighter one in the morning. Make one on Playlists and choose which screens play it. See Playlists.
Your own pictures and videos
Drop a video or a picture onto the Motion window, or click Add and choose A video, picture or scene file…. Motion plays it first, asks for a name, and makes it a wallpaper. Videos play hardware-decoded, so they're cheap. See Adding videos and pictures.
Wallpapers other people made
Motion Hub in the rail shows scenes people have shared. Import adds one to your library, and from there you use it like any other. See Motion Hub in the app.
Pause, frame rate and battery
Pause all, in the bar at the top, stops every screen until you click Play all. Everything else about how Motion runs (frame rate, sharpness, when to pause, battery, sound) is in Settings. See Settings.
From the terminal
On Linux the same things work from a terminal:
motion-cli list # the scenes you have
motion-cli set nebula-drift # use one on every screen
motion-cli set nebula-drift --screen 2 # or on one screen (1 is the leftmost)
motion-cli set nebula-drift --span # or across every screen
motion-cli import ~/Videos/rain.mp4 # make a scene from a video or picture
motion-cli remove my-scene # delete one of yoursLast changed 2 November 2026. Something wrong here? Tell us.