The Most Relaxing Screensaver in the World

March 16, 2016

Many years ago I heard about an amazing seven-hour video of a Norwegian train, travelling from Bergen to Oslo. At the time, I thought it would make for a pretty great screensaver… and kind of left it at that.

Here’s the ten minute version. You can see how it would make for a great screensaver:

Fast forward to today, and I happened to be talking about screensavers with my coworker Lindsey. I had electric sheep running on my laptop, and I started looking through the blog at various posts I had made about screensavers. And then I found the Oslo to Bergen post.

I wondered: seven years later… is it now easier to use movies as a screensaver? A few quick searches later, I discovered a free app called Save Hollywood that lets you do exactly that.

I grabbed a quick mp4 of the Bergensbanen video, installed SaveHollywood, and I was up and running in no time!

Hard to believe there wasn’t an easy way to do this circa 2009, but I’m really excited that I’ve finally got this working.

If you’re on a Mac and would like the same setup – I’d encourage you to grab a copy of SaveHollywood. To assuage any concerns, several other reputable sites have covered this app (notably, OS X Daily and Lifehacker).

Next, you need a copy of the video (but as an mp4 file). For the really adventurous, you can grab the full version as either a 22GB or 246GB file. But if you’re like me… you may just want the quick 10 minute version.

You can just convert the YouTube video into an mp4 file. If you’re not sure how to go about that – no worries. I went ahead and did that, and posted the file up to my site.

I figured I’d save you some time. You can grab a copy of the video by clicking on this link.

With those two pieces, you should now be able to set up a pretty sweet (and relaxing) screensaver. Watching your computer slip into standby mode has never been this relaxing! And I’m guessing you’ll be so mesmerized by the footage… you might never want to wake your computer up ever again.

[Video shared via NPK and a Creative Commons license]