Simple DVD slideshow

Twice so far this year I've had to produce a slide-show on a DVD. Despite being an aging medium, DVDs to present a useful format for slide-shows, in that DVD players are fairly uniform and ubiquitous. This means you can be reasonably confident of being able to display your slide-show, regardless of whatever other equipment your venue provides.

The process detailed here will produce a DVD which will play automatically (ie no menu). Each photo will fade in, pause, and fade out. At the end of the slide-show the play-back will loop to the beginning. All of these effects are configurable, but this I feel this style is the simplest and most elegant.

Lest I have to try and figure it out for a third time, this is the process I went through:

1. Install imagination and devede. Both are packaged for Debian and Ubuntu
2. Copy all your photos to a temporary directory
3. Edit and run the following script:
   

   #!/bin/bash
   DIR=/path/to/your/photos/
   IMGFILE=/path/to/output/file.img #Imagination file
   
   SLIDE=1
   TOTAL=$((`find $DIR -type f |wc -l`*2)) # two slides per photo
   
   cat << EOF
   #Imagination 2.0 Slideshow Project - http://imagination.sf.net
   
   [slideshow settings]
   video format=1080
   background color=0;0;0;
   distort images=true
   number of slides=$TOTAL
   
   EOF
   
   # Sort by date, otherwise just use `find $DIR -type f` for alphabetical order
   for FILE in `find $DIR -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 stat -c %y\ %n | sort |awk '{print $4}'`
   do
      cat << EOF
   [slide $SLIDE]
   filename=$FILE
   angle=0
   duration=8
   transition_id=19
   speed=4
   no_points=0
   anim id=0
   anim duration=1
   text pos=4
   placing=0
   font=Sans 12
   font color=0;0;0;1;
   font bgcolor=1;1;1;1;
   
   EOF
   
      let SLIDE++
   
      # blank slide between photos, so they fade from and to black
   
      cat << EOF
   [slide $SLIDE]
   gradient=0
   start_color=0;0;0;
   stop_color=1;1;1;
   start_point=0;0;
   stop_point=1;1;
   duration=1
   transition_id=19
   speed=4
   no_points=0
   anim id=0
   anim duration=1
   text pos=4
   placing=0
   font=Sans 12
   font color=0;0;0;1;
   font bgcolor=1;1;1;1;
   
   EOF
      let SLIDE++
   done

4. Open the new img file in Imagination
5. Check through your photos and make sure they're in the right order and all the correct way up
6. Select "Export" from the "Slideshow" menu. Enter the destination filename and select the aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9). Imagination will now create a MPEG video of the slideshow
7. Run DeVeDe. Select "Video DVD"
8. In the left-hand panel, change the name of the first title to something suitable. Click "Properties" and select "Play this title again (loop)" (assuming this is how you want the DVD to behave)
9. In the right-hand panel, click "Add" to add the Imagination video. There are a lot of options in the "File properties" menu, most of which you probably don't need to worry about. Under the "Misc" tab is an option labeled "This file is already a DVD/xCD-suitable MPEG-PS file". Selecting this avoid DeVeDe from re-processing your video.
10. Once all is to your liking, click "Forward", specify a destination file and click "Ok". DeVeDe will create an ISO image, suitable for directly burning to a DVD

That completes my rough and ready guide to making a slide-show DVD. There's undoubtedly a few holes, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out. (This is mainly so I can remember how to do this again next time!).