Apple has created a new screensaver for the fourth-gen Apple TV that consists of a collection of videos taken all over the world. While it’s possible to locate these screensaver videos online and download them from Apple’s website, there hasn’t been a way to set them as your Mac’s screensaver.
Thanks to developer John Coates, that’s not the case anymore. Coates published a Mac screensaver this week that lets you choose to run any of these videos when your Mac has been idle.
The screensaver is called Aerial, and it’s available for free from Coates’ Github repo. Once you’ve installed it, you can open up the settings in System Preferences and choose any (or all) of the available video streams from Apple. The videos are separated by location (34 videos from China, Hawaii, New York, and San Francisco are available) and are split up into day and night shots. You can check or uncheck any videos that you want to use or skip.
The screensaver also supports the ability to play a different video on each connected display.
It appears Aerial streams the videos from Apple’s site instead of bundling them (likely for copyright reasons and to keep the screensaver size reasonable) so you will see some network traffic if you choose to use this.
As mentioned above, you can grab Aerial from Github now. It requires OS X Mavericks or newer.
