DSH Wallpaper Engine

What it does

DSH Wallpaper Engine puts your local Wallpaper Engine library behind the DSH web interface. It auto-discovers the Steam installation, lists your wallpapers, and renders the portable types as a fixed background layer behind the chat: Video wallpapers play through a <video> element, Web wallpapers load in an iframe, and Scene wallpapers are replayed by an in-plugin pure-JS scene renderer. Around that it wraps an iOS-style liquid-glass settings window (accent color, glass color, opacity), custom uploads, content-rating and type filters, hide/restore, playback-speed and flip controls, and rotating playlists.

Two clarifications keep the description honest. Application wallpapers cannot be embedded in a web page and are excluded from the picker by design. And the package description still advertises Scene wallpapers “as extracted static frames” — that line is stale: since v0.6 the README describes a full scene renderer (object tree, textures, puppet meshes, particles, CPU-implemented shader effects) producing a complete 3840×2160 frame, with main-texture extraction and the workshop preview image as successive fallbacks.

How it works

• Host side — a Cordis plugin locates Wallpaper Engine by reading Steam’s libraryfolders.vdf (non-default drive installs work, and WSL /mnt/<drive> mounts are detected), enumerates projects/defaultprojects, projects/myprojects and steamapps/workshop/content/431960/*, then registers same-origin HTTP routes on the DSH webserver: inventory, media (with Range support), previews, scene frames, uploads, settings, media info and transcode streams.
• Client side — a browser module fetches the list, paints the chosen wallpaper behind the three-column app, and registers a first-level Wallpaper Engine settings page with the liquid-glass cards, picker dialog, mascot pull-rope drawer and adjustment tabs. The manifest sets dsh.client.immediately, so the client loads on start.
• Uploads and state — custom JPG/PNG/MP4 uploads live in a plugin-managed directory (default ~/.dsh-wallpaper-engine/uploads, movable, content-deduplicated). One caveat: the v0.4.0 section says all settings moved to a host-side ~/.dsh-wallpaper-engine/config.json with automatic localStorage migration, yet several feature sections still describe selection, hidden state and playlists as localStorage-backed. The README contradicts itself here — treat the exact storage split as uncertain.

The plugin exposes no tools or prompt text to the model; the README states zero token overhead.

Requirements — and the update order you must follow

The README marks this as required reading, in bold: “两个前置条件都满足之前，请勿更新本插件” — do not update this plugin until both prerequisites are met. Since v0.7.2:

1. DeepSeek Harness 0.1.5-rc.1 (DSH Desktop ≥ 2.0.7) first — via the desktop app’s version info or the releases page.
2. Then dsh-better-sidebar ≥ 0.19.0 — dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-better-sidebar@latest. The right-sidebar glass adaptation is built against it; users still on the 0.1.2-rc.1 kernel should stay on better-sidebar 0.18.x — do not mix.
3. Then this plugin. If the order was reversed, updating kernel and sidebar to matched versions recovers; no rollback of this plugin is needed. The README also suggests updating your other plugins, since old ones can fail to load on harness 0.1.5.

Note the mechanism: dsh-better-sidebar does not appear in the package’s peerDependencies — the requirement is a README instruction, not something the installer enforces.

Further requirements and disclosures, all from the README or manifest:

• A prepare lifecycle script exists: prepare: node scripts/prepare.mjs builds the client on git checkouts. This is why github: installs fail under pnpm 11, which blocks build scripts from git-hosted packages by default (ERR_PNPM_GIT_DEP_PREPARE_NOT_ALLOWED). Install from npm — the published package is prebuilt.
• Runtime ffmpeg auto-download. For video thumbnails and fps-cap transcoding, ffmpeg resolves in three tiers: an explicit DSH_WE_FFMPEG path (or an ffmpeg/ folder inside the plugin directory), then an automatic download raced across npmmirror and GitHub (streaming write, magic-number and size validated, per-source timeout, cached under ~/.dsh-wallpaper-engine/ffmpeg/, source overridable via DSH_WE_FFMPEG_URL), then the system PATH. This is a plugin downloading executables at runtime — disclosed in the README, and worth knowing before first use.
• It reads your Steam library files (the VDF and wallpaper directories above) and serves only enumerated files over its routes; the README states it does not expose the arbitrary filesystem, and that uploaded files stay on the local machine.
• Peer dependencies: Cordis ^4.0.1, the dsh client runtime/slots and host webserver at >=0.1.0-rc.6, React ^18.2.0. Runtime dependencies include a GLSL parser, jpeg-js and a headless GL package for the scene renderer. No engines field is declared.
• Telemetry: not documented. Assume undocumented rather than safe.

Known limits

• Application wallpapers do not work — external windows cannot be embedded; they are filtered from the picker and rotation candidates.
• Scene wallpapers are static frames (scenes with embedded video textures play that video); pure-shader or unusual-texture scenes fall back to main-texture extraction, then to the workshop preview image.
• The fps-cap transcode needs ffmpeg and NVIDIA NVENC (av1_nvenc, falling back to h264_nvenc); without either, the feature silently keeps the original video. Platforms outside the auto-download table (the README names musl/Alpine) get no download at all.
• Occlusion pause applies to video only — web (iframe) wallpapers cannot be paused externally, only throttled by the browser when hidden.
• The browser must allow muted autoplay (loopback is fine on modern browsers). On Edge, video wallpapers render through canvas instead of <video> to dodge an unclosable built-in toolbar overlay.
• DSH Desktop’s immersive fullscreen/kiosk window had an intermittent whole-screen white flash on repaint; v0.6.4 mitigates it by reducing compositing layers — described as an optimisation, not a guarantee.
• The picker UI text is Chinese-English mixed; the bundle is not wired into the DSH locale namespace.

When to use it — and when not to

Use it if you run dsh web or DSH Desktop on a machine with Wallpaper Engine installed and want the interface to feel like yours — video or scene wallpaper behind the chat, glass panels everywhere, playlists rotating. The settings depth is genuinely large, and the host-side config file means it survives restarts, random ports and browser-data wipes.

Do not install it on a headless or TUI setup — there is nothing to paint behind. Do not install it before updating the harness and dsh-better-sidebar in the order above, and do not install via github: on pnpm 11 expecting the prepare build to run. If runtime downloads of ffmpeg binaries are unacceptable, pre-provision DSH_WE_FFMPEG or skip the fps-cap and video-thumbnail features. On macOS there is no Wallpaper Engine client — use the community-maintained fork dsh-plugin-wallpaper-engine-mac instead. And if a busy background hurts readability, the README’s own advice is to lean on the darkening, border, blur and opacity sliders — no single preset fits every wallpaper.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-plugin-wallpaper-engine

Restart dsh web, then open Settings → Wallpaper Engine. macOS users install the separate community package instead: dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-plugin-wallpaper-engine-mac (maintained by Jerry; repository ruijiaang-lab/dsh-wallpaper-engine). Avoid github: installs — the npm package is prebuilt and sidesteps the pnpm 11 build-script block.