This is a "plugin" for the Video Disk Recorder (VDR). Written by: Klaus Schmidinger Project's homepage: www.cadsoft.de/vdr Latest version available at: www.cadsoft.de/vdr This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING for more information. Description: ============ The 'pictures' plugin implements a simple picture viewer. There is already an 'image' plugin out there which has a lot more functionality than this one, but it's way too complex for my taste, and also converts the image files on-the-fly, which makes it slow on slow hardware. This plugin assumes that the pictures have already been converted to MPEG frames (with the 'pic2mpg' script that comes with this archive), and doesn't implement any fancy features like zooming, panning or tiled previews. It's just a very simple viewer. It also assumes a rather particular directory structure (see below), which I have found to fit well for my needs. If you use a different structure, the plugin should still work, but the information displayed in the caption may not be as expected. Remote control key functions while in the Pictures menu: ======================================================== - Left/right/Up/Down: navigate in the menu as usual. - Ok: opens a directory or displays the selected picture. - Red/Play: start a slide show at the first picture in the selected directory (or at the selected picture). Remote control key functions while displaying pictures: ======================================================= - Left/Right: advances to the previous/next picture. At the end of a directory it automatically advances to the first picture of the next directory and displays the caption. - Up/Play: start the slide show. - Down/Pause: stop the slide show. - Blue/Stop: exit from the picture viewer. - Green/Prev: skip to the first picture in the previous directory. - Yellow/Next: skip to the first picture in the next directory. - Ok: toggle the caption display. - Back: return to the picture selection menu. The slide show starts with the picture immediately following the one that is currently visible, and continues until the last available picture, automatically crossing directories as necessary. Pressing any of the Left/Right, Green/Prev, Yellow/Next or Back keys automatically stops an ongoing slide show. Directory structure: ==================== The 'pictures' plugin requires a particular directory structure in order to work properly. Starting at some base directory (e.g. "/path/to/pictures"), there is one directory level marking the year in which the pictures were taken, followed by a level with a properly sortable combination of month and description, and finally the plain picture files, as in /path/to/pictures/YEAR/MONTH_DESCRIPTION/*.jpg For example /path/to/pictures/2007/06a_Vacation_in_Colorado/dsc01234.jpg /path/to/pictures/2007/06a_Vacation_in_Colorado/dsc01235.jpg /path/to/pictures/2007/06b_Our_cat/dsc01236.jpg The MONTH is "01" for January through "12" for December. If there is more than one entry for one month, it should be followed by a letter to make them sort correctly. Note that this is just a suggestion on how to make the directories sort in the correct chronological order. Instead of the two digit month number, optionally followed by a letter, you can use anything else you like. There must be an underscore between the MONTH and the DESCRIPTION part, and any underscores within the DESCRIPTION will be converted to blanks when displaying the description (this is done so that blanks can be avoided in the directory names). Preparing the files: ==================== In order to display the pictures as "still pictures" on the DVB device, they need to be converted into MPEG frames. This procedure takes some time, and would make viewing pictures sluggish, especially on slow hardware. Therefore the script "pic2mpg" must be used to convert all picture files before using this plugin, as in pic2mpg /path/to/pictures /path/to/pictures.MPG This will recursively walk through all pictures in the source directory and convert them into MPEG frames, stored in the destination directory. The extension ".MPG" is just a suggestion, you can name the directory anything you like, and it doesn't have to start with the same path as the source directory. Just don't make the destination directory a subdirectory of the source directory, because this would surely lead to problems. See "pic2mpg -h" for a list of available options. The pic2mpg conversion can be run any time, even if converted pictures already exist. It will only convert pictures that haven't been converted yet. Any changes to the source directory will be reflected in the destination directory accordingly after pic2mpg has finished (note that this especially means that any files or directories in the destination tree that have no corresponding entry in the source tree will be deleted!). So you can run pic2mpg, for instance, after copying new pictures into your picture directory, or after making any other kind of changes to your existing pictures. It might even be a good idea to run pic2mpg in a (nightly) cron job.