Creating a show with 4K Slideshow Maker

Processing

With Make Slideshow, you start processing the slideshow with the given parameters, which you set up first with the Settings menu or just before starting processing. Figure 4 shows a selection of settings. Rendering took about 30 minutes on a high-end desktop PC with two CPU cores for a show of 11 images. The software made excellent use of the multi-core architecture. In my test, close to 100% of the cores were in use (Figure 5). The completed file was in the ~/Videos/4K Slideshow Maker directory with the specified title and the corresponding video format file extension.

Figure 4: The 4K Slideshow Maker settings provide the key processing parameters.

Figure 5: The software used the multicore architecture of the test computer to its fullest.

Completion

You have some options when it comes to outputting a slideshow: If the laptop has HDMI output and the TV as HMI input, it's enough just to connect them. If you still have a CRT monitor with SCART input, you need a DVD player with SCART input. However, you also need to use a format that DVD players understand. This may sound trivial, but it fails on Ubuntu mostly because of the imperfections of most burn programs. The file must be in MP2 format. Brasero gave up after some initial error messages involving missing libraries. Even after installing the package, the software simply stopped after a few minutes.

K3B refused to burn completely because the file wasn't in MP2 format. DeVeDe reported an error about the program library used and also just stopped. Ultimately, burning the file in AVI format to a CD did work and I was able to play the movie. Two methods needed to be used. After compiling the slideshow with 4K Slideshow Maker in MP4 video format, feed the file as video into Kdenlive [3]. Then, save the video in MP2 format, use Bombono to convert the resulting file into a video DVD image and burn it with your favorite burn program to disk.

The path to video DVD or video CD is somewhat easier with WinFF [4]. Here, you simply convert the file compiled with 4K Slideshow Maker directly into an image for a CD or DVD.

My test showed that the version obtained with WinFF supported full-screen view, whereas compiling with Kdenlive created a black border. This problem could possibly be addressed with some fine-tuning of Kdenlive's parameters.