Offline Mode

If you want to use Aerial on a Mac behind a firewall or with no network access, the easiest way starting is to copy the content of the cache folder from another Mac where Aerial is already installed.

If that's not an option, you can manually recreate a cache folder by downloading files manually. This is how to download ALL videos.

Automated version (needs a terminal)

Assuming you are using a Mac and have homebrew installed (if not use your package manager of choice on your system), install wget and jq :

brew install jq
brew install wget

Then it's super easy, move to the location where files should be downloaded :

cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver/Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial/

Then simply do, for 4K SDR videos from tvOS12 :

cat entries.json | jq -r '.assets[]."url-4K-SDR"' | xargs wget -nc -i

(this will obviously take a while 😅)

Replace url-4K-SDR with url-1080-H264 or url-1080-SDR for 1080p H264 (default) or 1080p HEVC (and url-4K-HDR for 4K HDR).

Manual version

We recommend you start with the first one, consider the others optional :

Download and untar https://sylvan.apple.com/Aerials/resources-16.tar (tvOS16 resources), unzip the .tar file and find the entries.json file.
Optionnally, also download and untar https://sylvan.apple.com/Aerials/resources.tar (tvOS12 resources), rename the bundle to TVIdleScreenStrings12.bundle and the JSON to tvos12.json.
Optionnally, also download and rename https://sylvan.apple.com/Aerials/2x/entries.json to tvos11.json (tvOS11 resources, also in 4K)
Optionnally, also download and rename http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/000/Features/atv/AutumnResources/videos/entries.json to tvos10.json (The original Aerials, in 1080p H.264 only)

You can then download the videos you want from the JSON files. In the 4K JSONs, you are looking for the url-1080-H264 (1080p H.264, most compatible format), url-1080-SDR (1080p HEVC, better quality, requires a recent Mac for hardware decoding) or url-4K-SDR (4K HEVC). If you want to download the HDR versions, you can but please note that they will only play in Catalina, and a recent/fast Mac is heavily recommended.

Please try to download the videos in the order mentionned (tvOS13 first) as videos routinely gets replaced with better versions. Because you will be downloading files manually, you will end up with many duplicate versions of the same videos. You can clean them up by going into the Advanced tab and use the Trash old videos feature there. You can find more information about the process in this issue