Someone asked last night about making a DVD Slideshow from a set of
photos - ie making a DVD that will play on a commercial DVD Player and
show off the holiday snaps for Grandma.

This basically involves :

1. resizing the photos to DVD standard frame sizes (720x576 for PAL,
720x480 for NTSC IIRC)

2. making a DVD compliant mpeg-2 fle from the set of photos, possibly
muxing in a soundtrack and text captions

3. Using dvd-author to make it all into DVD compliant file structure,
possibly with menus.

Luckily there is already a number of packages that do this. 

Firstly now that I have installed digikam, gwenview and all their
plugins there is an option in one of those (possibly both) to make mpeg
video from a selection of pics. I haven't looked too far into this yet.
Presumably once you have your mpeg you can use one of the normal dvd
creation programs to make the DVD file structure, menus etc. (I use
http://dvdstyler.sf.net )

Secondly there is a command line program called (imaginatively)
dvd-slideshow which is based at http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/ 

This is very versatile as it allows all sorts of transition effects, and
picture effects. In particular the Ken Burns effect which is described
here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_burns_effect#Ken_Burns_Effect

However there is a lot of setting up and futzing about to get the input
file right, there are heaps of options for each photo. There are some
nice samples of the output you can download.

Thirdly there are also at least two gui front ends to dvd-slideshow,
which make the whole thing a lot easier. They are detailed on the
dvd-slideshow page. 

I have tried Slideshow Creator (http://slcreator.sourceforge.net/
written in gambas, (sorta VB for linux) - it worked nicely, I made a
nice shortish movie with sound and kenburns effects from some photos I
took of the band my son played in last year. It obviously takes a bit of
processor power to do all the resizing, particulary if you are cropping
for a complex kenburns effect, but you can do a quick render to see what
it will look like, and once you have it right you can set it to go on a
full render (perhaps while u sleep). However when I started it up today
it crashed, so that requires investigation.

I have not tried DVD-Baker (http://dvd-baker.sourceforge.net/ ). Someone
mentioned it last night, so maybe someone else could post their
experience?


-- 
Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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