Personalizing the computers we own — whether it's a phone or a proper desktop — is one of life's few simple comforts. It can bring you joy knowing that your favorite picture will greet you every morning when you start your day. Now, movements behind the Windows 11 development scene indicate that pictures could soon be exchanged for videos. Microsoft has finally added the option to use video files as desktop backgrounds in the latest Windows 11 Insider build, and it works seamlessly, as spotted by @phantomofearth on X.
Windows DreamScene is back! Hidden in the latest Windows 11 Dev/Beta build (26x20.6690) is built in support for setting video files like .mp4 as your desktop background: pic.twitter.com/B4vdtfvqScSeptember 20, 2025
Fortunately, Microsoft is finally answering the community's decades-long prayers and testing this feature. It's available as part of the Windows 11 26x20.6690 Dev/Beta builds, for which you have to join the Windows Insider program. Once in, all you have to do is enable feature ID 57645315 and restart the explorer.exe process in Task Manager. After that, just open settings, and you should see .mp4, .m4v, .mkv, .mov, .wmv, .avi, and .webm in the list of supported file formats when you go to select a new wallpaper. Simply pick a video you want and you're good to go.
Keep in mind that this feature only works on the desktop, not on the lockscreen so you're not going to get those macOS-style aesthetic TikToks out of your utilitarian Windows system anytime soon. More importantly, though, since this is an experimental feature, there's no saying when it will actually make its way to the stable, public release channel — if at all. Similar to the native speed test button that Microsoft is trialing, this feels like a fairly iterative yet obvious improvement that we should, therefore, see go mainstream relatively soon.
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