Who wants to watch a slideshow on your computer? That would mean crowding around a small screen on your laptop. A slideshow on CD or DVD on your TV in the comfort of your living room, however, is a much more pleasant proposition. With 4K Slideshow Maker, you can show off your multimedia material with just a few clicks. The software is a no-brainer with its simple operation, but creating a video CD/DVD does require an additional tool.

Installing the software is easy, at least under Ubuntu. The 4K Slideshow Maker homepage [1] already has the link to the program package. 4K Slideshow Maker is available for Linux as well as Windows and Mac. After downloading, simply clicking the Debian package normally opens the package manager ready for installation.

Creating

The program interface is initially simple and tidy, with the few menu options creating no mysteries (Figure 1). The user instructions [2] and the homepage itself are currently in six languages apart from English.

Figure 1: The newly started program is simple: The few menu options are easy to grasp without much explanation.

There are no special hoops to jump through; simply use Add Photos to bring in photos from your hard disk or other media. The resulting dialog lets you choose from multiple files.

The same goes for Add Instagram. After you enter account data, a public offering of pictures appears (Figure 2). All you need is background music. With Change Music, you can pull in music off your PC. After loading, the program shows the filename at the bottom of the window.

Figure 2: After entering user data for an Instagram account, the associated public photo library is ready for integration.

Correcting

Once you've loaded pictures and background music, 4K Slideshow Maker requires just a few corrections, essentially limited to rotating and moving images (Figure 3).

Figure 3: If an image is positioned incorrectly, use a click to set it right.

That's the long and short of it. You can now create a slideshow from the files. Before you begin correcting, however, it's recommended that you first preview your collection by clicking on Show Preview.

The slideshow then appears in reduced video quality, but it's a good touch. You may find errors in your slideshow that you can quickly correct.

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.

Conclusion

4K Slideshow Maker is a powerful program for creating a slideshow on the computer in various formats. The operational concept is intuitive, and a manual is almost unnecessary. If you want the slideshow to appear on a computer, no further work is needed. For a video CD or CVD, however, you will need a separate tool.

In my test, Kdenlive and WinFF proved successful, but with some laborious workflow. Converting to video CD/DVD might prove easier on other systems beside Ubuntu.