Pentra is a lightweight, high-performance Live Wallpaper engine for macOS and Android. It allows you to set video wallpapers, animated loops, or playlists as your desktop or mobile background without sacrificing battery or system performance.
- Native & Lightweight: Built directly on top of macOS APIs (
NSWindowandAVFoundation) for a minimal memory footprint (~60MB RAM). - Universal Media Engine: Seamlessly supports Videos (MP4, MOV, M4V, 3GP), Animated GIFs, and High-Res Images (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC).
- Visual Playlist Manager: Manage wallpapers with interactive thumbnail previews. Click any thumbnail to activate it immediately with real-time active indicators.
- Menu Bar Quick Controls: Control playback directly from the macOS Menu Bar (Now Playing title, Play/Pause, Next Wallpaper, Mute/Unmute).
- Drag & Drop Import: Drag video and image files directly from Finder into the Settings window to instantly add them to your playlist.
- Shuffle & Flexible Timers: Cycle wallpapers sequentially or randomly, with custom intervals (1 min to 1 hour) or a Never static mode.
- Menu Bar Color Sync: Automatically syncs your native macOS wallpaper behind the scenes for translucent menu bar color matching without desktop caching lag.
- Dynamic 4K Native Support: Native hardware-accelerated playback and Menu Bar sync up to 4K (3840x2160) resolution.
- Smart Battery Threshold: Leverages
IOKitto read raw battery capacity and automatically pause playback below your chosen battery percentage. - Smart Auto-Pause & Recovery:
- Automatically pauses video playback when your Mac goes to sleep or when full-screen applications/games are active.
- Deep Sleep Hardware Recovery: Dynamic CoreVideo context rebuilding prevents the infamous
AVPlayerblack screen bug after waking from long sleep.
- Cinematic Controls: Adjust playback speed (0.5x to 2.0x), apply real-time Gaussian Blur, tweak brightness, and control volume.
- Start at Login: Automatically launches quietly in the background when you start your Mac.
- Native Android Live Wallpaper Service: Powered by Media3 ExoPlayer with hardware-accelerated video decoding (
VideoWallpaperService). - Modern Jetpack Compose UI: Premium dark-themed interface built with Material 3.
- Aspect Ratio Preservation: Native 9:16 vertical previews and fill-with-crop live wallpaper scaling to prevent video stretching or distortion.
- Auto-Cycle Rotation & Shuffle: Set rotation intervals (1 min, 5 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 hr, or Never) with random shuffle mode. Deep-sleep elapsed time checks guarantee timely wallpaper changes upon waking.
- Live Wallpaper Preview Sheet: Interactive bottom sheet with real-time effects preview (speed, volume, blur radius, brightness, battery threshold).
- Quick Settings Tile: Toggle wallpaper playback directly from your Android notification/quick settings panel.
- Power Saver: Automatically pauses live wallpaper when battery drops below your chosen threshold.
- Matching Visual Identity: Native adaptive icons and round icons matching the original macOS Pentra icon.
Pentra/
├── Pentra/ # macOS Application Source
│ ├── PentraApp.swift # macOS Main Engine, Window Layering, & Menu Bar Controls
│ ├── ContentView.swift # SwiftUI Settings Interface & Visual Playlist Manager
│ └── Assets.xcassets/ # macOS App Icons & Asset Catalog
├── PentraAndroid/ # Android Application Source
│ ├── app/src/main/
│ │ ├── kotlin/com/pentra/android/
│ │ │ ├── VideoWallpaperService.kt # Android Live Wallpaper Engine (ExoPlayer)
│ │ │ ├── QuickTileService.kt # Quick Settings Tile
│ │ │ ├── WallpaperPrefs.kt # SharedPreferences Store
│ │ │ └── ui/ # Jetpack Compose UI & ViewModel
│ │ └── res/ # Android Drawables, Mipmaps & Icons
│ ├── build.gradle.kts # Gradle Build Config
│ └── settings.gradle.kts
├── README.md # Documentation & Release Notes
├── LICENSE # GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3)
└── .gitignore # Git Ignore Rules
- Download Pentra.dmg from this repository.
- Open the
.dmgfile and drag Pentra.app into your/Applicationsfolder.
Important
macOS Gatekeeper Warning ("App is damaged" or "Developer cannot be verified"): Because Pentra is a free open-source app distributed directly without a paid Apple Developer ID signature, macOS Gatekeeper may flag the downloaded app with a quarantine attribute.
To bypass this restriction and launch Pentra, open your Terminal app and run:
sudo xattr -cr /Applications/Pentra.appBuild debug APK with Gradle:
cd PentraAndroid
./gradlew assembleDebugThe compiled APK will be generated at:
PentraAndroid/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
- macOS: macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later, Xcode 15+ (for building).
- Android: Android 8.0 (API 26) or later, JDK 17+ (for building).
This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3). See the LICENSE file for details.