[KPhotoAlbum] Creating DVD slideshow from KPhotoAlbum images w/metadata

[Shawn Willden]

On Sunday 22 October 2006 15:27, Robert Graf-Waczenski wrote:
> Since nobody seems to be listening to this thread, i'm replying to myself,
> to supply some more details about what i do and what i think is missing.

I think your first step is to post your questions on the right mailing list.  
It's an understandable mistake, but those plugins are not part of 
KPhotoAlbum -- they're from the KDE Extra Gear project, and are used by at 
least a couple of different applications (the other one being Digikam).

The subscription page for the kde-extra-gear mailing list is:

	http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-extra-gear

Another option is to look into the source yourself.  I took a quick look at it 
and it doesn't look too bad.  There's a shell script that uses ImageMagick to 
do all the heavy lifting; you would have to enhance that script to support 
adding text to the slides -- I'd find a copy of another slideshow-making tool 
called dvd-slideshow for ideas.  It is also a shell script that uses 
ImageMagick, and it supports putting subtitles on images, so you can look 
there to see how to do it.

Then you'll have to modify the C++ portion of plugin to send the keywords to 
the script.  If you look in the C++ source and find where it calls the 
script, it should be pretty obvious how to do that, even if you're not a C++ 
programmer.

Another approach might be to use dvd-slideshow, and create a plugin that 
generates a dvd-slideshow script the way you want it.  Your plugin wouldn't 
necessarily have to have any user interface, to keep it quick.  For a 
quick-n-dirty solution, this is what I'd do.  Make a new plugin with no UI 
that generates a dvd-slideshow script and then calls dvd-slideshow to do the 
work.

Another approach would be to write something to grab the information out of 
the KPA XML file directly and generate a dvd-slideshow file, then use 
dvd-slideshow to create your movie.  It would be fairly easy to do this with 
an XSLT script.

If you don't have the programming skills to do any of these, then you need to 
find some way to motivate someone who does.  Find a friend who is a 
programmer and see if he'll help.  Perhaps send email to the two authors 
listed in the MPEG Encoder documentation, and see if they're interested in 
adding the feature you want, or helping you to do it.

I hope this helps,

	Shawn.