Back in the early days of my iPhone hacking (read: the beginning in 2007) I was very fond of a troublesome but cool app called vWallpapers. I could use small mov or mp4 files and load an animation or video clip as my background for the iPhone Springboard. It was very processor and battery intensive but it was fun. You can also download an app called vWallpaper (add the vWallpaper repo http://i.danstaface.net/deb/ in Cydia or you can use them directly in Winterboard. Although with Winterboard there is a little black screen ‘pop’ between the loop in the video, and vWallpaper’s stability has always been a bit of concern to me. To manually add a video to Winterboard via SSH you need to:

• SSH into your iPhone and navigate to /Library/Themes. (Tutorial here via SimonBlog)
• Once there, Make a folder called Anything.theme and drop the mp4 file you can get below (right-click and Save Target As.. to your drive) into that folder.
• Remember once you copy the file via SSH it MUST be named Wallpaper.mp4 in the .them folder or it will not work.
• Rename the file Wallpaper.mp4 if it’s not already.
• Go into Winterboard on the iPhone and select the folder you named (In this case you might have named it WoodBlocks.theme) then hit the Home button to respring.
• Voila! Video wallpaper!
• Note: If you leave the iPhone on the Springboard and turn off the device, it will still be running the video wallpaper and WILL drain your battery. Simply go into any app, then turn the device off. No battery drain. Same goes for vWallpapers.

WARNING! I do not recommend you try to use video wallpapers of any kind with the iPad. Though it is technically possible, the 256MB of RAM in the iPad is already being taxed, and this hack would, in my humble opinion, makes things… not good.

For a tutorial on vWallpapers watch this from Redmond Pie on YouTube. vWallpapers is iOS 4 ready.

If you’d like to see more of our video wallpapers (we have some cool ones we custom-made and can share if there is interest) let us know in the comments!