Terry Howard

Ever wanted to use your own videos, or any video for that matter, as your screensaver in Mac OS X?  Photo slideshows with the “Ken Burns” effect are all fine and good but sometimes you just want that funny video you shot of your kid greeting you when you return from lunch.  After trying my hand a bit at making my own with Quartz Composer using this tutorial, I was unsatisfied with the results and lack of options.  I did a little more searching and came across SaveHollywood. This awesome little bit of freeware installs just like any screensaver (that is just drop it in the screensavers folder of your Library) and let’s you build a playlist of videos to work with. Several options let you customize the experience, check them out:

Just add the videos you want to the playlist from anywhere on your computer and that’s it!  It couldn’t have been any easier.  Here’s a sample video for you to try it on.  It’s a fairly clean loop Quicktime MOV (right click to download) I took at SeaWorld of the pools out front of Shark Encounter.  If you look carefully you might see a nice big redfish swim by.

I also found this tutorial on how to use Opera to use this screensaver with videos from services like YouTube and other flash based systems.