For the past 12 months or so I've been working on a skunkworks project to organise my photographs, both digital and scanned from paper. Although far from complete it's now fairly stable and I've recently added a module to author DVD videos, having sampled a few other authoring programs and not been very impressed. I would welcome feedback from anyone able and willing to give it a try. Here's a brief feature list:
1 Photo organiser with 3-level assignable categories (to be extended to multi-way, multi-level categories). 2 Create captioned HTML slideshows from any selection of images, with optimal image sizing for Web use. 3 Screen capture module creates slideshows directly. 4 DVD authoring module acts as a front end to spumux, dvdauthor, etc. 5 Full GUI interface with Linux and Windows compatibility. 6 Built-in help documentation. 7 Open Source license - source available on request. Development assistance would be most welcome.
And here's the URL:
http://www.eclecity.net/mediacity.html
Please bear in mind that the software has only so far been used by three people, so don't expect commercial-standard robustness if you do unexpected things with it. Contact me with any questions, particularly if it won't run for you.
-- GT
Graham wrote:
For the past 12 months or so I've been working on a skunkworks project to organise my photographs, both digital and scanned from paper.
<snip>
This sounds great, I wonder if I could use it.
I work at a community college with a public art gallery on site and we're trying to keep an archive of all the pieces of artwork displayed in our exhibitons on a web site.
What I really had in mind was a program which will automatically generate a web page with a gallery of thumbnails, which when clicked on take you to the full sized picture. It would need support for a title and a caption on each picture and would be used for batches of between 30 and 100 jpegs at a time.
Perhaps you have a different solution to displaying lots of pictures.
1 Photo organiser with 3-level assignable categories (to be extended to multi-way, multi-level categories).
Does the "photo organiser" include thumbnails? Is this a web interface or a GUI interface on the operating system?
2 Create captioned HTML slideshows from any selection of images, with optimal image sizing for Web use.
What does an HTML slide show look like? Do you have a demo?
3 Screen capture module creates slideshows directly. 4 DVD authoring module acts as a front end to spumux, dvdauthor, etc. 5 Full GUI interface with Linux and Windows compatibility.
I do have a Windows box and currently an Ubuntu Linux box lying around at work, but the main operating system is OSX, I'm only really using the GNU/Linux box for a web server.
6 Built-in help documentation. 7 Open Source license - source available on request. Development assistance would be most welcome.
And here's the URL:
Not much information here, do you have any screenshots?
Please bear in mind that the software has only so far been used by three people, so don't expect commercial-standard robustness if you do unexpected things with it. Contact me with any questions, particularly if it won't run for you.
I'm not a Java Developer. What do I do with a .jnlp file?
Many Thanks
On Wednesday 01 Dec 2004 17:53, Ben Francis wrote:
I'm not a Java Developer. What do I do with a .jnlp file?
What I did with it was open it using /usr/java/jre1.4.2_06/javaws/javaws. I gather this is normally supplied in a .zip file as part of the Sun Java Runtime Environment, but on my Mandrake (10.1) system it seemed to be there already (after installing JRE). Try 'locate javaws' if you have trouble finding it.
I can confirm that it loaded and ran fine, but I didn't try doing anything much with it. Looks nice. Can I use it to make video DVDs? How does it compare with (say) qdvdauthor?
Joe x
On Wednesday 01 December 2004 18:32, Joe Button wrote:
On Wednesday 01 Dec 2004 17:53, Ben Francis wrote:
I'm not a Java Developer. What do I do with a .jnlp file?
What I did with it was open it using /usr/java/jre1.4.2_06/javaws/javaws. I gather this is normally supplied in a .zip file as part of the Sun Java Runtime Environment, but on my Mandrake (10.1) system it seemed to be there already (after installing JRE). Try 'locate javaws' if you have trouble finding it.
I can confirm that it loaded and ran fine, but I didn't try doing anything much with it. Looks nice. Can I use it to make video DVDs? How does it compare with (say) qdvdauthor?
Joe x
As far as I know it needs Java 1.5.0; I'd be surprised if it did much with 1.4.2. On Windows it automatically goes and gets the Java update but I did that manually on my Linux system so I can't tell what might happen otherwise. Sun have added a lot of new features and included an XML parser, which the program uses to read its own config files.
I tried qdvdauthor and found it rather clunky. Plus it left bits of itself running on my system after it quit. Then I tried Varsha, a Java front-end for dvdauthor; this didn't work and there was no response from the author. I already had the photo organizer so I figured it shouldn't be too difficult to bolt another module into its GUI. That was about a month ago, so I guess it wasn't too difficult after all.
I'm assuming you have a pile of files in MPEG-2 format. If you're starting with DV-Cam AVIs, Kino is an excellent tool for converting them and doing other useful odd-jobs such as extracting stills. If your source is AVIs downloaded from (say) ShareTV via the e-Donkey network, these will need to be converted using transcode or mencoder; that's one of the next things for me to try.
The Mediacity DVD authoring tab helps you build a menu for a bunch of video clips such as the above. In this initial version you can only have a single menu screen; the DVD standard allows for hierarchical menus but I have no need for them so I didn't include it. (Oh, the power of being the author!) You import the clips, either into a single titleset or in groups into a number of titlesets, as you please, then create buttons that will each play a titleset. Specify a background JPG and a suitable sound clip. Menus must have sound - a small silence clip is suitable but must be in MPEG format. I'll email a short silence file to anyone who wants one.
I got really frustrated by qdvdauthor's button handling, so tried to do better. You can drag buttons round the screen with the mouse, though for resizing you have to do some typing. Buttons can have semi-opaque backgrounds, either to brighten or darken but either way make the text stand out better (that feature went in today) and you can change the font face, style and size.
There are text panels to show you the scripts the program builds to run the command-line tools, a button to launch a video player (e.g. xine) on your built DVD and finally a button to call the DVD burner. I've tried to make everything user-configurable and there's a built-in page of help available for all the main program features. It does help to get familiar with dvdauthor and its supporting programs, though the manpages are often terse.
-- GT
On Wednesday 01 December 2004 17:53, Ben Francis wrote:
I work at a community college with a public art gallery on site and we're trying to keep an archive of all the pieces of artwork displayed in our exhibitons on a web site.
What I really had in mind was a program which will automatically generate a web page with a gallery of thumbnails, which when clicked on take you to the full sized picture. It would need support for a title and a caption on each picture and would be used for batches of between 30 and 100 jpegs at a time.
Wouldn't be difficult to add a link to each picture. The program actually outputs a set of 640x480 (or whatever size you specify) JPEGs, plus an HTML/JavaScript file to run them as a slideshow. The latter can be edited as you please; if you come up with a useful enhancement I'll look seriously at adding it as an option.
Does the "photo organiser" include thumbnails? Is this a web interface or a GUI interface on the operating system?
The program runs on your computer, not off a server. Like other photo programs it creates a set of thumbnail (160x120) images for the files it finds, and uses these for speed in the main user interface. Unlike many other programs it also provides a means to categorize every picture; this is an area due for a significant enhancement so in a future version you'll be able to categorize a picture of Marge on holiday as being in the category holiday/2001/Blackpool and also people/Marge/Blackpool and any other suitable categories. All this should make it very easy to find "All holiday pictures featuring Marge".
What does an HTML slide show look like? Do you have a demo?
I'll try to set one up at the weekend. Bit busy right now; a shiny new Zaurus C860 popped through the door today and is demanding all my attention ;)
Not much information here, do you have any screenshots?
I'll make running the progam itself into a slideshow when I get the time. Give few a few days.
I'm not a Java Developer. What do I do with a .jnlp file?
Type this at a command prompt:
javaws http://www.eclecity.net/mediacity.jnlp
If it doesn't work you probably don't have javaws on your path. This is part of the Java distribution; the simplest thing is to symlink to it. And maybe to java too; difficult for me to say as my systems are already set up.
Java Webstart (javaws) is a mechanism invented by Sun for running applications with as little effort as running an applet, except with full local permissions rather than in a sandbox. It downloads and installs the target (jnlp) file, then before running each time checks to see if there's a newer version available. If so, it copies it over the old one and runs it. For example, I uploaded a new version this evening, fixing a couple of bugs and adding some new features.
-- GT
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Ben Francis -
Graham -
Joe Button