DVD Slideshow

I have been playing around with DVD slideshow software, and I have been less than impressed at what is available for Linux. I have taken “dvd-slideshow” and “dir2slideshow” and used them together with a PHP script that I brewed to get the result that I wanted for a particular effect called “Kenburns”. It is most recognizable as Apple’s photo screensaver which zooms and pans in random directions. Had I not wanted this specific effect (the only awesome effect in the package), then I could have used ManDVD to get the job done. ManDVD doesn’t seem to have a maintainer, a website, or a community, so I doubt we will ever see this effect added to this software package.

Dvd-slideshow utility wanted specific values for the Kenburns transitions, ex: ./IMG_5842.JPG:10::kenburns:69%;59%,47%;79%;bottomleft

The values correspond to “image:subtitle:effect:beginning zoom level: panning start position:end zoom level: panning end position”. One can certainly have granular control over the entire operation, but this is getting way too tedious to render a slideshow. Really, who cares where the images zooms, and pans to, as long as it is tasteful right? So I could plug in a few numbers, but with almost 200 lines like this, and not wanting to have the same effect duplicated, I decided to cook up a script that generates random numbers (within reason, of course) . I consider this the tasteful defaults that should come with either utility mentioned above to take the pain out of this task.

In the spirit of open-source, if anyone is interested in this script, it can be found here.

A few more notes: I had approximately 180 images (each being about 3MB) all running through the Kenburns effect. Between these images, I had a crossfade transition lasting 2 seconds. This project took slightly less than 24 HOURS TO RENDER!

I hope that dvd-slideshow is further developed, as it is a great start on filling a Grand Canyon-sized hole of multimedia development on the Linux desktop.