Created My First Screen-Saver

I came across this video clip this evening and was intrigued by the effort this person put into creating this simulated display of apparently the control screen of Doctor Who's Tardis.  His intention was to create a screen-saver from this video and so he links wide screen and normal screen versions of the screen-saver for Windows at the end of this video clip.  Well, I got to thinking how would I do the same for Mac. 

So after some quick searches I found http://iscreensaver.com/downloads.shtml which is a freeware toolkit to take any video source and build a screen saver from it for both Mac and Windows.  Now all I had to do was record the video stream from YouTube and trim out the dialogue from the beginning and end of the stream.

For that I first found http://www.getmiro.com/download/for-osx/ which is a freeware stream recorder.  I simply copied the HD stream embed tag from YouTube and copied the source URL as the target stream for Miro.  I then used Quicktime (for Mac) to crop the MP4 video Miro created from the YouTube stream.

After entering the trimmed video clip as the base of my screen saver project I adjusted some options and punched the "build for Mac" button and poof, my Tardis console screen-saver.  The freeware version of iScreensaver toolkit, of course, puts a "built on iScreensaver" tag but it's actually not too intrusive and fair game for the quality it allows you to produce with it.  I was perhaps thinking later on to create a few more screen savers for some non-profit interest groups I'm involved with and maybe a Torchwood themed one.  Write me for more details if you want to create your own screen saver.