Problem: we’ve received a CD full of photographs from our daughter, who’s away doing VSO in the Sudan. We wanted to share them with my mother, who hasn’t any internet, PCs, or technological wizardry. But she does have a DVD player.

Solution: the open-source DVD Slideshow project, which has produced a series of bash scripts to automate the process of turning a collection of digital photos into a DVD slideshow, complete with menus, subtitles, sound tracks, etc. The process is best explained by following the worked example.

Did it work? yes – I was very pleased with the end result, which produced a perfectly acceptable result by leaving everything on its default settings. I found that setting the display time for each picture to around 10 seconds felt about right (the DVD player ‘pause’ and ‘play’ buttons work as expected )

Any issues? As well as downloading the DVD Slideshow tools from SourceForge and installing them (sudo dpkg -i dvd-slideshow-0.8.2-2_all.deb), I needed to download a lot of additional software:

sudo apt-get install mjpegtools sox dvdauthor vorbis-tools libsox-fmt-all

and despite doing sudo apt-get install jhead I couldn’t get dir2slideshow to sort the photos by JPEG header picture taken time, which would have been nice. If I get a wet weekend I’ll peer inside the enormous bash script and see if I can find out why – the joy of open-source!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.