Sorry guys for making another non-HTPC thread. You guys are my AV linux brains. :)

Is there a Linux solution for:

-taking a lot of pictures and turning them into an MPEG movie slideshow and then
-burning said slideshow movie to a DVD to be played on a regular DVD player?

Here's why I can't just make a DVD slideshow: this is for my great Aunt. She's technologically challenged...and that's an understatement. She's in her 80's and has written instructions which she has to refer to ever time she wants to watch a normal DVD movie which is almost never. If it has buttons lights and runs on electricity, she'll have trouble with it. She had a bunch of old slides converted to DVD picture discs by a camera store. She absolutely cannot learn how to navigate the menus on the DVD player to view the pictures (I tried to teach her but as soon as I got to the part about "now press the down arrow to move down the menu..." she was completely confused).

What I want to do is take these pictures and convert them to a slideshow that is a movie so there are no menus. She just puts in the disc (using the instructions ;) ) and presses play and the pictures are displayed for about 5 seconds at a time. Maybe a fade effect inbetween pictures.

Any idears?

Haven't tried it, but looks like what you're looking for: http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page

I found a couple of nice app's for this. I was able to make a slideshow for my class reunion a few month ago, I am not at my main system right now and can't remember their names. I will post back later. One is named Smile. They have a deb package for download.

EDIT: The other app I used is called Imagination. Both will output a video file which can then be burnt to dvd. I use DeVeDe for dvd authoring.

shane2943 -- If she is in her 80's, then 5 seconds/picture may be too fast. Most older people can't focus on a scene and recognize what's on it in that short a time (cognitive reaction time slows down as we age). A fade-out/in will help, but the image should be on the display for around 10 seconds, which may be better (after all, it's for their enjoyment, not for speeding through).

If you can set up a mini-slideshow for her on your computer, you could test out her reactions to the speed of the slide show. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop. Using the included "F-Spot Photo Viewer", the default slide show mode uses a "disolve" (about a second) between pictures and about a 10 second repetition rate. That seems to be about right.

If it's too slow,of course, she'll fall asleep :rolleyes:.

Haven't tried it, but looks like what you're looking for: http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page

I'll check that out, Myth. Thanks buddy! :)

I found a couple of nice app's for this. I was able to make a slideshow for my class reunion a few month ago, I am not at my main system right now and can't remember their names. I will post back later. One is named Smile. They have a deb package for download.

EDIT: The other app I used is called Imagination. Both will output a video file which can then be burnt to dvd. I use DeVeDe for dvd authoring.

Kewl! Will check both of those out. Thanks!

shane2943 -- If she is in her 80's, then 5 seconds/picture may be too fast. Most older people can't focus on a scene and recognize what's on it in that short a time (cognitive reaction time slows down as we age). A fade-out/in will help, but the image should be on the display for around 10 seconds, which may be better (after all, it's for their enjoyment, not for speeding through).

If you can set up a mini-slideshow for her on your computer, you could test out her reactions to the speed of the slide show. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop. Using the included "F-Spot Photo Viewer", the default slide show mode uses a "disolve" (about a second) between pictures and about a 10 second repetition rate. That seems to be about right.

If it's too slow,of course, she'll fall asleep :rolleyes:.

The 5 second interval was her idea, not mine. She currently has the pictures on DVD with built in slideshow software. She can't figure out how to get it to work (hence the reason for this thread) but when I got it working, the delay between pictures was about 10 seconds and she said that is far too long. She has thousands...THOUSANDS....THOUSANDS of pictures (58 DVDs full to be exact) so she wanted less delay. I told her that if she comes across a picture that she wants to look at for longer, she can always pause (she CAN do that ;) ) the movie.

Another question: how can I do a mass-resize of images? All of these slides were scanned in at a relatively high resolution but they're going to be viewed on a Sony 27" or 32" (can't remember) tube TV so the resolution can be lower to fit more images on the disc.

Thanks, fellas!

Another question: how can I do a mass-resize of images? All of these slides were scanned in at a relatively high resolution but they're going to be viewed on a Sony 27" or 32" (can't remember) tube TV so the resolution can be lower to fit more images on the disc.

Thanks, fellas!

Install Imagemagick (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imagemagick.org%2F&ei=DEO6SqvVOoiOMeCdpNsP&usg=AFQjCNEj86ZXrN6Iqx9rZ73Ad4L4ypmDtQ) and write a bash script to apply the "convert" command to each image. Something like


#!/bin/sh

# change this to vary the scale factor
SCALE_FACTOR="50%"

# make a subdirectory to hold the scaled images
mkdir scaled

# iterate over the files in the current directory and rescale
for f in *
do
convert -geometry $SCALE_FACTOR $f scaled/$f
done

exit 0

Store this code in a file (say "rescale-images.sh") and make it executable with the command "chmod a+x rescale-images.sh". I usually put scripts like this into /usr/local/bin; you'll need root privileges to install them there. Now navigate to the directory with the images and run the script.

cd /path/to/grandmas/images
rescale-images.sh

You'll get a resized replica of each image in a new "scaled" subdirectory. If there are other types of files in the image directory, you might need to replace "for f in *" with "for f in *.jpg" to restrict the command to JPEGs.

You can use the -size parameter instead of -geometry if you want to specify a particular size.

Imagemagick is an incredibly powerful command-line tool for managing images. Another example is converting PNGs to JPEGs with a command like "convert myimage.png myimage.jpg". See the man page (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Famath.colorado.edu%2Fcomputing%2Fsoftware%2 Fman%2Fconvert.html&ei=UkG6SuCPFI7OM6ej_c8P&usg=AFQjCNFPdoHpoSjP4OKPsM2Rk6GCcp3u4w) for more details.

One other approach to creating slideshows is to make an animated GIF with a program like the GIMP (http://www.gmp.org/). You'd start with the initial picture, then use the Add As Layers option in the GIMP's File menu to overlay the other pictures. You could then resize the entire animation in one step using the Image > Scale command. If you save the result as a GIF, you'll see options to save it as an animation. You can specify the delay between frames in the dialog box that follows (times are in milliseconds, so five seconds is entered as 5000 ms).

... I usually put scripts like this into /usr/local/bin; ...

For Gnome users, another option is to put the script in the following folder: ~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts

Then with a slight rewrite of your script, you could just navigate to the folder, right click in the folder (or on an image file in the folder) select the "convert" script and all the images in that folder would be converted.


Google "nautilus scripts" if you want more info. Especially if you want to know what enviroment variables are available to identify the file/folder where the right-click occured.

Haven't tried it, but looks like what you're looking for: http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_PageIn addition to dvd-slideshow, there is also the front end jDVDSlideshow: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jdvdslideshow/ where jDVDSlideshow purportedly works together with dvd-slideshow. It generates files that you can use with dvd-slideshow (http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net) to make a slideshow. It helps you to adjust the effects that dvd-slideshow offers you.

Some other (kde) applications to consider are smile (slide show maker in Linux environment) http://smile.tuxfamily.org/ and 2mandvd: http://2mandvd.tuxfamily.org/ (it also has english menus) ..

The author who produced smile and 2mandvd, also produced mandvd, which was their original effort at this kde application. While they have stopped development at mandvd, someone else has picked it up and produced a new version:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/ManDVD?content=83906

If one wishes to mess around with zoom and pan special effects on a still image, the stills2dv works pretty neat: http://www.deniscarl.com/stills2dv/

There was also an application called image2mpeg, but its home page does not appear to be functioning. A google search might help you there.

I've also read digikam has a limited capability in this area: http://www.digikam.org/

I myself use kdenlive for this, which is a bit over kill, but it gives me lots of flexibilty: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/

Easy point/click install for SMILE, Imagination, DeVeDe, 2Mandvd, and others-


http://www.getdeb.net/category.php?id=12


Also, current PPA's for DVDStyler DVD authoring-

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/dvdstyler/index.php?title=InstallationDebian

Easy point/click install for SMILE, Imagination, DeVeDe, 2Mandvd, and others-

http://www.getdeb.net/category.php?id=12

Also, current PPA's for DVDStyler DVD authoring-

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/dvdstyler/index.php?title=InstallationDebianThats ok for Ubuntu users.

OpenSUSE Linux users can go to packman and do a search for their app of choice and use the one-click install there: http://packman.links2linux.de/

Although having typed that, I'm still a user who prefers to use a software package manager such as openSUSE's zypper, instead of a one click install.

I just came across the following new Linux DVD authoring program that seems promising, though I should mention it here:

http://www.bombono.org/

Thanks, Tux!

I'm not to the DVD creation point yet, but I've been using Imagination to convert the pictures to .VOB files. It's really working well! Easy interface and it's creating professional looking slideshows!

Houston, we have a problem.

Ok, so I FINALLY finished converting all of my Aunt's pictures into .VOB movies. On average, they're about 55-105 minutes long each (about 900MB to 1.3GB) and there's 54 movies. I started to create the first disc in DeVeDe and it's saying that one movie fills up 94% of the disc. WHAT?!?! The disc is over 4.7GB! How does a 1.1GB movie fill up 94% of the disc? I was hoping to put at least 2 movies per disc so she isn't stuck with 50-something discs.

Thanks in advance! :)