Why LumaSpace uses so little battery
When we first showed LumaSpace to a friend, his reaction was: "Cool, but my laptop will be dead by lunch." Fair point. Moving video on your desktop sounds like a terrible idea for battery life.
Turns out, it doesn't have to be.
The trick is not playing video
Most "video wallpaper" apps just play an MP4 behind your windows. That means a full video decoder running constantly, even when you can't see the desktop. We tried that first and got about 90 minutes of battery drain per hour of playback on a MacBook Air. Terrible.
So we rewrote the rendering pipeline. LumaSpace only decodes frames when the desktop is actually visible. Window covers the wallpaper? We pause. You switch to a full-screen app? We pause. Battery drops below 20%? We pause automatically.
Encoding matters more than you'd think
We re-encode every clip ourselves before it goes into the library. The originals from our filmmakers are gorgeous 4K ProRes files, sometimes 2GB per minute. Nobody wants that on their disk.
Our pipeline converts them to HEVC with custom quality settings tuned per scene. A dark, moody cityscape can compress much harder than a bright ocean wave. We test each clip individually. The result: 42 scenes take up about 2GB total, and they still look great on a Retina display.
The numbers
On a 2023 MacBook Air M2, with a wallpaper playing and the desktop visible, LumaSpace adds about 2-3% CPU usage. When covered by windows, it drops to basically zero. Energy Impact stays in "Low" territory in Activity Monitor.
It's not magic. It's just being careful about when to do work and when to stop.