You can get the perfect a part of the brand new Apple TV on your Google TV, and at no cost

Apple TV does a lot of things better than Google TV, but when there’s one factor I’ve at all times been a bit jealous of, it’s the screensavers. Instead of static photographs, Apple TV performs 4K video clips as a screensaver, they usually simply look approach cooler. I wasn’t about to purchase a wholly new field only for that, although. So, I used a free app known as Aerial Views to convey those self same screensavers to my TCL Google TV.

Google TV’s screensaver recreation is weak

Your TV deserves higher

Google TV has screensavers, however they’re nothing particular. Sure, there’s a good library protecting every part from mountains and cities to artwork, however all of them look fairly boring after some time. You can join Google Photos to see your personal images, however that’s not one thing everybody likes to do. I definitely don’t.

Apple TV screensavers are a distinct story as a result of they’re not static photographs. Apple TV exhibits aerial drone 4K movies, they usually’re genuinely eye-catching. You’d see top-down photographs of cities, scenic views of nationwide parks, and distant areas just like the Grand Canyon. It actually doesn’t matter what’s truly on the display. Every single a kind of clips feels prefer it’s price watching.

Screensavers aren’t one thing everybody cares about, after all. Still, those you get on the Apple TV truly make you wish to preserve your TV on even whilst you’re not watching something.

Bring Apple TV-like screensavers to your Google TV

Give your Google TV a glow-up

Aerial Views is a free, open-source app that brings Apple TV’s video screensavers to any Google TV. It contains 4K clips from Apple, Amazon, Jetson Creative and Robin Fourcade. You can choose your most well-liked sources and even specify what kind of content material they present — nature, seashore, metropolis, sea, outer area, or countryside. These stream over the web, in order that they use as much as 4GB of information each hour.

You may even load movies from an Immich server, Nextcloud Memories server, NAS, or your PC. If you need one thing that works offline, the app also can load screensavers from native storage or a USB drive. You can seize the video packs for that from Aerial Views’ GitHub page.

Video screensavers are solely half the story. The actual deal is all of the extras the app presents. Head to its settings menu and also you’ll see choices so as to add overlays. You get eight overlay slots, two per nook, and you’ll fill them with climate, a clock, the date, a countdown, or a customized message.

Heck, you possibly can even management the dimensions and spacing of every of those overlays. If it’s a climate overlay, you possibly can management the unit. For a clock overlay, you possibly can choose the time format. And when you’ve added a music overlay, you possibly can specify whether or not it exhibits the artist title or simply the track. It even allows you to alternate the overlay positions when you’ve got an OLED TV and are worried about burn-in.

My favourite factor about Aerial Views is that it allows you to management the video playback. You can use the D-pad in your distant to skip to the subsequent or earlier video, alter the playback pace, change the brightness, pause a video, or disguise overlays. It even allows you to play a selected video that you just like on loop with out going into settings.

You’ll additionally discover choices to arrange a sleep timer, alter the scaling, change the transition between movies, and much more. There’s clearly no must mess with each single choice right here, nevertheless it’s there if you would like. Finally, you can too preview the screensaver from the app itself.

Setting it up takes some effort

The large catch

Aerial Views is totally free and customizable, however getting it working in your TV takes a little bit of effort. This is definitely a Google TV drawback. Starting with Android 12, Google TVs not allow you to choose a third-party screensaver app from the common settings menu, so merely putting in the Aerial Views app received’t do.

First, you’ll must unlock the Developer Options menu and allow USB debugging. Then, go to the community settings menu and discover the IP handle of your TV. From right here, it’s worthwhile to use a cellphone or a pc to run a couple of ADB instructions. I personally used my Windows PC for this half since I already had SKD Platform Tools arrange there. Finally, it’s worthwhile to run these instructions to set Aerial Views because the default screensaver choice.

adb join ip_address

adb shell

settings put safe screensaver_components com.neilturner.aerialviews/.ui.screensaver.DreamActivity

settings put system screen_off_timeout 600000

All of this does take some work, after all. But if you would like these video screensavers, Aerial Views is definitely worth the effort. Their GitHub web page has all of the directions specified by element, which makes the setup clean.