The new Apple TV arrives with an incredibly gorgeous array of screen savers, and now you can get those amazing screen savers on the Mac too. There are tons of different screen savers in total, with daytime and evening views of beautiful footage taken from flying over Hawaii, New York City, San Francisco, London, and the Great Wall of China.
From footage of cityscapes to landscapes, these screensaver are truly impressive and terrific quality, and they’ll look great on your Mac screens. Here’s how to get the incredible screen savers from Apple TV in MacOS and Mac OS X right now:
Get the Apple TV Screen Savers for Mac
- Download the Aerial screen saver from github here, then unzip the file (it’s likely in your Downloads folder)
- Double click the “Aerial.saver” file and choose to install it for this user or all users*
- Once installed, click on “Screen Saver Options” to customize specifics about the Aerial screen saver
* You may need to right-click on the file and choose “Open” to get around Gatekeeper. Alternatively, you can install the screen saver manually by placing the appropriate file into the user or root /Library/Screen Savers/ directory.
You can choose to enable or disable specific screen savers, so if you only want to see the outrageously beautiful shots of sea cliffs, valleys, clouds, and sunsets in Hawaii, then you can do that. Or if you want to see everything but a specific NYC screen saver, you can do that too. But they all look fantastic, so you may as well leave them all enabled and enjoy each individually.
The Aerial screen saver is somewhat interactive as well with the following key presses:
- Spacebar will pause the video
- J key will rewind or play backwards
- L key will fast forward and speed up the videos
If you hit J or L a few times, the video will reverse or speed up by a factor for each press.
The video demo and images below will give you a sample of what to expect from the Apple TV screen savers on the Mac, but you need to see these for yourself as live footage on your own screen, still shots and example video just do not compare to the real thing or do them justice.
Some still image samples are below:
Note some of these images have the optional clock enabled, a feature possible in all OS X screen savers.
For mac users with multiple displays (like myself), the screen saver will show a different aerial footage per display by default, but you can turn that off.
If you really want to get fancy and you don’t mind the minor resource usage of doing so, you can set the screen savers as your desktop wallpaper in Mac OS X, which will give you a live background of sorts.
One thing worth noting is that by default the videos from these screen savers are streamed from Apple by requesting the appropriate HD movie from an Apple CDN using the appropriate URL from this json file on Apple.com. This means the videos are not downloaded to the Mac with the screen saver, instead they are streamed or served from cache. Each video is about 150MB, which may be important if you’re using iPhone Personal Hotspot to share the internet connection with a Mac, or have strictly metered bandwidth. New versions of the screen saver have an offline mode which will store the videos locally, but they are still downloaded on first run.
If you do want to download all of the videos to the Mac yourself for whatever reason, you can either access each individual URL from the json file above and save them manually, or grab them all with curl and wget courtesy of this command from (@TwitterEmbedGoesHere)
curl http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/000/Features/atv/AutumnResources/videos/entries.json | sed -n 's/.*url" : "([^"]*).*/1/p' | wget -i -
Again, there are about 35 videos, each somewhere around 150 to 200mb, so this will take up quite a bit of disk space.
Or just keep streaming them from the screen saver, that’s fine too.
If these are not up your alley, perhaps browsing through some of our previously featured screen saver selections will better suit you and your Mac. Enjoy either way!
Follow Me:
Top Best Sellers!!
