How to Use a Custom Video Background in Microsoft Teams (Mac and PC)
Static backgrounds are so 2024
It’s easy to use a custom photo background in Microsoft Teams, but what about a custom video background? It’s not built into the application itself, but I came across this great video from Jason Burton that explains how to do it. The video is PC-focused, but once I understood the steps, it was easy to adapt the technique for Mac users.
I wanted to create a video of an office background with people moving in the background, to give a more realistic impression of participating from an office location. On a Mac, open Quicktime Player and choose New Movie Recording from the File menu. Capture at least 30 seconds of video for a semi-realistic loop. Remember where you save that file, since we’ll need it later.
Here comes the inventive part. Since Teams already contains a few video-based backgrounds, it’s a matter of finding them in your File Explorer or Finder and replacing one with the video you just took, using the exact same file name.
Based on the video, there are some paths you can traverse to find these files on a PC:
Classic Teams
AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Teams/BackgroundsNew Teams:
AppData/Local/Packages/MSTeams_**/LocalCache/Microsoft/MSTeams/Backgrounds
On a Mac, open a Finder window and, while holding down Option, select Library. Search for feelingDreamy and choose Library above the file listing, where it asks if you want to search This Mac or Library. Right-click one of the results and choose Show in Enclosing Folder. The path is lengthy, but here it is:
/Users/username/Library/Containers/Microsoft Teams/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MSTeams/Backgrounds
Rename the file you saved from Quicktime Player exactly the same as one of the feelingDreamy files you’ll replace. Include the mp4 extension (replacing the “mov” extension of the Quicktime file with “mp4” worked fine in my test). In my case, I replaced the file named feelingDreamy4Animated_v=0.1.mp4
During a Teams meeting, you should now be able to select the new video as your background.