Stardock
[pic]
Media Guide
Executive Summary
Stardock DeskScapes™ is a program that allows users of Microsoft Windows® Vista Ultimate™ to have animated wallpapers on their desktop.
DeskScapes supports three different types of animated wallpapers:
1) Looping high-definition video wallpapers. These are called Normal Dreams.
2) Triggered high-definition video wallpapers (same as #1 except that the animated wallpaper changes based on a specific condition such as time of day, weather, or other events.) These are known as Triggered Dreams.
3) Dynamic animated wallpapers – animated wallpaper that is generated on-the-fly using 3D graphics. These are known as Dynamic Dreams.
DeskScapes currently requires users to have Windows Vista Ultimate installed and uses Microsoft Windows DreamScenes for the video engine component.
DeskScapes delivers a new animated wallpaper format (.DREAM) so that users looking for animated wallpaper can quickly find them through searches. .DREAM files support all 3 types of animated wallpaper and can embed author information as part of the file as well.
DeskScapes is free. Users can create their own .DREAM files using another free Stardock program, Stardock DreamMaker.
Users can download hundreds of free animated wallpapers at
The product home page is
Microsoft’s DreamScenes’ technology relationship to DeskScapes
During Stardock’s development of DeskScapes, Microsoft contracted Stardock to work with them on a new project for Windows Vista Ultimate which came to be called Windows DreamScenes®. Windows DreamScenes was developed by Microsoft as an “Ultimate Extra” for users of Windows Vista Ultimate. It was designed to play high-definition video as the user’s desktop background.
Microsoft contracted Stardock to create animated wallpapers to be released with Windows DreamScenes including the default animated Aurora wallpaper.
To support the growth of animated wallpapers on Windows Vista, Stardock created a site, Dream. and released DeskScapes as freeware for users of Windows Vista Ultimate as well as DreamMaker to create animated wallpapers.
|Feature |Windows DreamScene|Stardock |
| | |DeskScapes |
|Plays .MPEG and .WMV content as |[pic] | |
|wallpaper | | |
|Plays .DREAM content as wallpaper | |[pic] |
|Supports Triggers for changing animated| |[pic] |
|wallpaper | | |
|Supports Dynamic (non-video) content | |[pic] |
|Supports author credit in dialog | |[pic] |
|Is Extensible | | [pic] |
|Requires |Windows Vista |Windows |
| |Ultimate |DreamScene |
|Price |FREE (with Windows|FREE (for users |
| |Vista Ultimate) |of Windows Vista |
| | |Ultimate) |
DeskScapes in action
Once installed, users can download hundreds of free .DREAM files from (the site Microsoft’s points to in order to get more animated wallpapers).
DeskScapes’s integration into Windows Vista Ultimate is seamless:
[pic]
Figure 1: DeskScapes integrates into the Vista desktop background dialog. It adds an author field to the dialog to users know who created the animated wallpaper.
As previously mentioned, DeskScapes supports 3 types of .DREAM files – high-definition video loops, triggered video loops, and dynamic dreams. Below we’ll discuss the differences:
High-Definition video-based wallpapers (Normal Dreams)
The most common type of animated wallpaper are video files. These are typically in .WMV or .MPEG format and then packaged as a .DREAM file. In this case, the only benefit that DeskScapes provides over Windows DreamScenes is that author information is displayed.
Playing a video does use up some CPU since the video has to be decoded. But these are also relatively easy to create.
[pic]
Figure 2: A well done video-based Dream can make an excellent animated wallpaper
High-Definition video-based wallpapers that change on events (Triggered Dreams)
Similar to the above, DeskScapes supports animated wallpapers that change based on specific trigger such as time of day, weather, or other defined condition.
[pic] [pic]
Figure 3: Triggered Dreams are still looping videos but automatically change based on a "trigger" such as time of day
Dynamically generated 3D animated wallpapers (Dynamic Dreams)
The last type of animated wallpaper is generated on the fly. Since these are, in essence, Direct3D applications as wallpapers, they can, literally, be anything.
The advantage of Dynamic Dreams is that they use virtually no CPU. They’re done completely on the video card.
[pic]
Figure 4: The Desktop Earth dynamic dream rotates in real-time and is shaded based on the time of day and the surface changes based on the time of year. It uses less than 3% CPU on a typical system.
Getting DeskScapes
DeskScapes is freeware. It requires Windows Vista Ultimate.
Download it and more animated wallpapers at:
It is also part of Stardock’s Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements which includes WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX and more.
Users of Object Desktop get additional animated wallpaper content that is not available for the general public.
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.