On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 03:16:27PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 03:00:29PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
How does the remote talk to the Pi by the way? The Pi doesn't have an infra-red interface does it?
Aha, a bit of Googling shows me that maybe 'CEC' is how to do it, I can see some Pi experimentation on the way.
Hmm, well a Raspberry Pi is a non-starter. It's just stupidly slow displaying JPEGs. My photo JPEGs vary from about 2Mb to maybe 8Mb in size. I've tried gthumb (a fairly lightweight program) and it takes around 20 to 30 seconds to load and display a picture.
I also tried the default image viewer on the PI (gpicview) and, if anything, it was slower than gthumb.
It seems to me that to get a remotely usable interface for viewing JPEGs one just has to have a fairly fast machine, without being able to process the images quickly *any* interface is going to be horrible to use.
... oh, by the way I did get a little way with CEC on the Pi. I got cec-client installed and working (had to compile it, the Raspian distribution one is broken) so I think that's possible, just the Pi isn't powerful enough for pictures.
The new Pi 2 would be quicker but not enough quicker, even two or three seconds wait makes a user interface rather uncomfortable.
Finally I would point out that browsing photographs imposes very different requirements on the user interface/experience. If you're viewing a DVD/Film then a wait for it to start doesn't really matter, nor does a wait really matter when listening to music. However when browsing still photos there really needs to be virtually no delay when the user says 'next picture please'. Quite often one wants to flick through several pictures quickly or select odd ones at random from the thumbnails, speed is essential. So, what works for *most* types of media in a Media Player app isn't necessarily right for pictures.
As a lightweight viewer gthumb is pretty close to what I want, with digikam on my desktop machine for serious manipulation.