GL DVD Slideshow

site in construction

GL DVD slideshow is a software to generate a slideshow of pictures and small videos. It is greatly inspired by the brilliant idea of the dvd-slideshow project http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net. But every frame of the video is rendered in real time with OpenGL. To summarize, it means that for a slideshow full of effects, GL DVD-slideshow should render the video about 30 times faster than dvd-slideshow, as soon as it is launched from an X server with 3D support.

GL DVD Slideshow uses the same format of text-based descriptor as dvd-slideshow. This text descriptor can be viewed as the list of every sequences and transitions in an easy to write format:

the list and the duration of all pictures which are displayed
transitions between the different pictures
Hints about the background, the font size for titles, ...

This is an example of descriptor:

background:2
./photos/img001.jpg:5
./photos/img002.jpg:5
crossfade:1
video:10:./photos/mvi001.avi
wipe:1
./photos/img003.jpg:5
doublespiral:1
./photos/img004.jpg:5
fadeout:2
background:2

The semantic of this descriptor is (almost) self-descriptive:
the background is displayed for 2 seconds (if nothing else is specified, the background is black)
then the file ./photos/img001.jpg is displayed for 5 seconds
then the file ./photos/img002.jpg is displayed for 5 seconds, and in the end, it crossfades into the movie ./photos/mvi001.avi, which is played for 10 seconds.
this movie is replaced using the wipe effect by the picture /photos/img003.jpg.
Five seconds later, the doublespiral transition is used to exchange /photos/img003.jpg and /photos/img004.jpg.
Finally, the last image fades out to background.

Believe me, no GUI (Graphical user interface) will ever be as efficient as this small piece of text if one wants to create a long slideshow (imagine that you want to put 1000 pictures and 999 transitions in Win.... Movie M....r ... ).

For those who are familiar with the dvd-slideshow project, il is the same format of files.

From the descriptor to the DVD

There is a long long long... way! For the lucky users of Firefox, see for yourself:

Right now, what works, and what doesn't work

Working:

DVD format: 4/3 PAL only (however every constants are in glds.h)
Sequences:

Black background
Still pictures (any format recognized by imagemagick)
Video sequences (any format recognized by ffmpeg)
titles (however the font is unique)

Transitions

crossfade
kenburns
wipe
fly
doublespiral

Not working yet:

Gradient or picture background (soon...)
Audio (Sorry, you will have to use Audacity)
Subtitles (soon...)
scroll effect (for very large images, else use Kenburns or wipe)

How to test it?

until the first realease, you will need to compile it. (more details will come)

It does for the moment only work under linux, support for windows and maybe mac will come later

On Debian/ubuntu, you will need to install the following packages in order to compile gl-slideshow:

libMagick++9-dev
libavcodec-dev (or a custom build of ffmpeg)
libavformat-dev (or a custom build of ffmpeg)
freeglut3-dev
ftgl-dev
mjpegtools (for mpeg2enc and mplex)
ffmpeg
g++
subversion (in order to download the code)
mplayer (or any player supporting m2v files)

You can just retrieve the code with:

svn co https://gl-slideshow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gl-slideshow

Then build it with:

cd gl-slideshow/src
make

If everything works correctly, you should end up with an executable called glds. Try to make a text-file like above (descriptor.txt), make sure it finds the videos and/or images, and run:

./glds < descriptor.txt | mpeg2enc -f 8 -c -q 4 -o test.m2v