Slideshow Creator: DVD slide shows from jpeg images!

With Slideshow Creator and dvd-slideshow you can transform your pictures in a beautiful dvd-quality slide show rich of fashinating effects like ken burns, pan and  animated transitions. Adding a musical soundtrack too you will have a really cool result!

The editing is made in a visual and fast way so you can have quick results. If you want an idea of the final video look at this simple demo. For some screenshots of slcreator graphical user interface go here.

Current Version and Requirements

This software is based on gambas so it should work on every Linux or U*ix like system where gambas is available.

Current version is 0.7.1 (released on 15 Jun 2006) developed with gambas 1.0.15-1 on a Debian Etch system. Download!

You need to install gambas runtime or gambas development ide.

I think it should work with higher gambas versions but as far as I know some gambas modules have been split so dependencies may change.

*** What's new *** 

You can find a complete CHANGELOG can be found here.

Special Features

Slideshow Time and Audio Time (Rel 0.7.1 and above)

You can launch slcreator with a command line parameter to open a specified slideshow, i.e.:

slcreator slideshow.txt 

Slideshow Time and Audio Time (Rel 0.7 and above)

In every row (if it makes sense) you can see how much time is elapsed from the start of the slide show (ST in seconds) and how much time is elapsed from the last audio track start (AT in hours:minutes:seconds).

Music Prelistening in every Row (Rel 0.7 and above)

In every row (if it makes sense) you can have a prelistening of the exact music that will play in the slide show

Subwindow Zooming Preview (Rel 0.6 and above)

In an image preview move the cursor on a subwindow, if it changes to a resize all cursor (4 directions cross) click and you will get a subwindow preview! Click again and you will be back to all image preview.

Direct Create slide show and Preview (Rel 0.6 and above)

After editing and saving the slideshow source you can immediately run dvd-slideshow from slcreator and preview the result with your favorite video player.

Selection only Create and preview (Rel 0.6 and above)

If you want to preview only a brief piece of a long slide show you can build only a subsection this way: switch in multirow selection mode, select the piece of slide show you want preview, build with "Create selection slide show" and preview the section video. This permits to try smaller and faster builds to gain a lot of time.

Dependencies

For Debian  based systems ( Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Knoppix, etc...) current version depends from the following packages:

    gambas-runtime

    gambas-gb-qt

    gambas-gb-qt-ext

    gambas-gb-sdl

For other systems should be the same, but I don't have an easy way to test it, sorry.

Why? ... and how!

I was tired to make poor quality slide shows in VCD/SVCD format and finally met dvd-slideshow: it is a very nice program that produces high quality DVD slide shows from jpeg images. It has crop, ken burns and pan effects.
For a more precise description refer to dvd-slideshow homepage at http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net.

I made some slide shows but realized that I wasted too much time to prepare the slide show “source”: I needed a visual program to speed up the process of ken burns, crop and pan effects creation.

I googled the net but didn't find any such program so I decided to create one myself: slcreator was born!

How I did it? I built it using gambas: a visual ide with a object oriented basic interpreter which permits to create great programs in a “fast” way. I tried some other languages but I was not skilled enough to use them for this kind of project! gambas permitted me to realize the job in a very nice way!

Usage

Slcreator is a visual tool so its usage is quite intuitive but you really need to know dvd-slideshow basics!

Organize your work: better results in lower time!

You are free but this hints can make your work easier!

Create a dir: this will be the main dir.

In the main dir create a subdir for images (i.e. images) and put jpeg files in it

In the main dir create a subdir for the final vob video files (i.e. video).

Open Slideshow Creator and adjust the configuration (Options menu+Other) setting the appropriate dirs names and build options and video player.

Open Slideshow Creator and use "New slideshow from dir" procedure in Tools menu to create a slide show for your images.

Edit the slide show as you prefer, then save it.

Use the "Create slide show" command (in File menu) to build and preview the video.

If something goes wrong try with dvd-slideshow (man dvd-slideshow for help) i.e. with the command “dvd-slideshow -n "Test" -o video -f test.txt” and check the command in build window of slcretor to find the misfunctioning cause. 

In video dir you will find the Test.vob video in mpeg2 format you can view with a video player (xine, totem ....)

License

This software is given WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY under GPL License in the hope it will useful and you can enjoy free software power and quality!

Thanks

As a linux user I want to thank all people working on free open source software, in particular related to this project I want to thank dvd-slideshow project and gambas project!

Who am I

My name is Marco Colnaghi, I live in Italy and work in IT field.

You can contact me by mail at this address: marco.colnaghi__at__libero.it