Smart Video Wallpaper Reborn plays video behind Plasma 6, and pauses it when you work

A wallpaper plugin, not a compositor tweak

Smart Video Wallpaper Reborn is a Plasma 6 wallpaper plugin, written in QML, that plays a single video or a slideshow of videos on your desktop and on the lock screen. The homepage is the KDE Store listing at store.kde.org/p/2139746.

The plugin is built for a specific shell, which decides both who can use it and how it behaves. A Plasma wallpaper plugin supplies the content of the desktop background, so this one hands Plasma a video surface instead of a still image, and the desktop effects such as the overview or show desktop are what it watches to decide whether to keep playing.

That relationship is why the feature list is long and specific rather than generic. The plugin has to play nicely with the rest of the shell: with a lock screen, with a second monitor, with the desktop effects, with the day and night styles Plasma switches between, and with the machine running on battery.

The consequence for you is that this is a Linux and Plasma 6 thing. There is no Windows build, no macOS build, and nothing for GNOME. If you are on Plasma 6 on Linux, the plugin slots into the wallpaper settings where you would otherwise pick a static image.

Pause conditions are the feature that makes it usable daily

The most important list in the feature set is not about video at all. It is the set of pause conditions, because a wallpaper that keeps playing while you type is a wallpaper you will uninstall.

The conditions available are: a maximized or fullscreen window, the active window, the presence of a window, never, based on the active desktop effect such as the overview or show desktop, and the screen being off or locked. So the plugin can be told to pause when a fullscreen window appears, or to pause whenever any window exists, or to keep playing unless a desktop effect like the overview is active.

The blur feature works the same way, with its own condition list, and that pairing is the point: blur on top of a video, triggered by the same situations. The blur settings include the condition, a radius and an animation duration, and there is a separate entry for blurring the background when the video is not in its original proportions, which is how you avoid stretched video on a monitor with a different aspect ratio.

This is the design decision that separates this plugin from a naive video wallpaper. The video is not a screensaver that you tolerate; it is content that yields to your work and comes back when you want it.

Battery mode, per monitor detection and day-night scheduling

Three more features are worth calling out because they address real objections to running video continuously on a laptop.

Battery mode takes a threshold. When the battery drops below it, the plugin pauses the video and disables the blur. That is a coarse switch rather than a power profile, but it means the expensive part stops on battery without you configuring anything else.

Per monitor windows detection matters on a multi monitor setup, where a window on the second screen can make the plugin think the whole desktop is busy. The plugin looks at windows per monitor, so a fullscreen window on one display does not necessarily stop playback on the other.

Day-night switching assigns videos based on conditions, and there are three ways to define the condition. You can use the Plasma style, meaning day or night as the shell reports it. You can use Plasma's own day-night cycle with its sunrise, sunset, day and night states, and the documentation is explicit that this one requires building from source. Or you can set custom times for sunrise, sunset, day and night.

That requirement is the sharpest limitation in the whole project, and it is worth planning around. The feature that most users would reach for, a wallpaper that changes with the time of day on its own, is the one that is not available in the packaged installs. A source build is a C++ and QML toolchain, CMake, and the plugin/ directory, so it is a weekend task rather than an afternoon one.

Installing from the AUR, OBS, Fedora or the KDE Store

There are four distribution channels in the documentation, and they are not equally supported.

On Arch Linux the package is in the AUR and the install is a single command.

yay -S plasma6-wallpapers-smart-video-wallpaper-reborn

The openSUSE Build Service covers Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Slowroll and Fedora Rawhide, with the project maintained by the author together with another packager, and installation instructions on the software.opensuse.org download page.

Fedora has a dnf package, and the documentation is careful about it. The package installs ffmpeg-free by default if it is not already present, which should work for most videos, and points at RPM Fusion for extra codecs if it does not. Then comes the line that matters: that package is not maintained by the author and may not be up to date with the latest release.

The KDE Store route requires you to install the dependencies yourself, and the documentation says they are required for video playback. On Arch that is the Qt 6 multimedia packages, qt6-multimedia and qt6-multimedia-ffmpeg.

So if you are on Fedora, expect to be a version behind. If you are on Arch or an openSUSE-family distribution, the packaged build is the maintainer's own and tracks the releases closely.

What the repository contains, and what the CHANGELOG tracks

The tree is small and tells you this is a plugin rather than a desktop project. There is a plugin/ directory with the QML and C++ sources, a CMakeLists.txt at the root, a package/ directory for packaging metadata, a translate/ directory for the translations, and bin/ for scripts.

Two scripts at the root are worth naming because they describe the workflow. install.sh handles the local installation, and package.sh handles building the package. The project is built with CMake, and the repository carries .clang-format and .clangd configuration files, so it is a compiled C++ component with a QML layer rather than a pure QML script.

Release management is automated. There is a .release-please-manifest.json and a release-please-config.json, which is the conventional setup for commit-message driven releases, and a CHANGELOG.md generated from that process.

The release history is frequent. The tags listed are v2.16.0 on 2026-10-04, v2.15.0 on 2026-09-20 and v2.14.1 on 2026-08-19, so this is a project on a monthly or better cadence, and the last push was on 2026-10-12. The repository is not archived.

That cadence is worth contrasting with the third-party packages. A plugin that releases every few weeks will always outrun a distro package maintained by someone else, which is exactly the gap the documentation warns about on Fedora.

GPL-2.0, funding links and the scope of the project

The licence is GPL-2.0, with the LICENSE file at the repository root, which is the customary choice for a KDE plugin and lets it be redistributed in modified form provided the terms are met.

The project is distributed on the KDE Store, so there is a distinction between the source repository and what a user installs from the store. The store listing is the homepage given in the project metadata, and the AUR and Build Service packages are the author's own distributions for the platforms where a store install is not the natural route.

The project is funded by donations, and the documentation asks for sponsorship to support the maintenance of this and the author's other projects, with GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, PayPal and Patreon links in the header. There is also a Discord and a Matrix space for support and discussion.

The scope is narrow and that is not a criticism. It is a wallpaper plugin for one desktop shell, with a feature set that reflects the shell's own concepts, exposed on the KDE Store and packaged for the main Linux distributions. If your requirement is a live wallpaper on GNOME, Wayland compositors other than Plasma, or a Windows machine, this repository is not the place to look, and the Plasma 6 lock screen and desktop effect integration would not apply.

Editorial conclusion

Smart Video Wallpaper Reborn fits a KDE Plasma 6 user on Linux who wants a video behind the desktop and on the lock screen, and who installs software from the AUR, the openSUSE Build Service or the KDE Store rather than building packages themselves. It does not fit a GNOME or Xfce user, since it is a Plasma 6 wallpaper plugin, and it does not fit anyone who wants the day-night cycle without a compiler, because the documentation states that the Plasma day-night cycle option requires building from source. Before adopting it, read the installation section for your distribution because the Fedora package is explicitly not maintained by the author, confirm that the Qt 6 multimedia dependencies are present since they are required for video playback, and check that the version you install matches the release you read about, since the latest tag listed is v2.16.0 from 2026-10-04.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-2.0
2. luisbocanegra/plasma-smart-video-wallpaper-reborn on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases