FFMpeg is breaking me …

Returning from a business trip to Singapore I found that I had taken some short vids with my iPhone which are rotated by 90, 180, or 270 degrees. This is another new requirement now that your software is supposed to not only detect the rotation of an image, but of a video as well.

What ever happened to the times when up and down was a clear physical property of a digital camera

So I had another fit and wanted to implement rotating vids which are part of a Slideshow ( because this is the place I can control ). I run into some issues again with the latest ffmpeg source from the source repository.

It seems that the API keeps changing and as a result qrender compilation breaks.
So now that I fixed one thing, I can try to see how to best incorporate the rotation of the videos.

I’ll get another release out as soon as I have it working on my box. So stay tuned.

QDVDAuthor 2.3.0 is out

I just released version 2.3.0 of QDVDAuthor. It has received all the nice little bug fixes and slideshow extensions that I was missing in it.
So go about and get the latest source.

I hope that I am not the only one to be using the new features, because it makes creating slideshow DVDs so much nicer and easier.
For the latest source you can get your fill Here

Below is a slideshow which uses a panoramic image. Looks quite nice.

I know that the next focus must be the porting to Qt 4.x, or better the upcoming Qt 5.x. But that is to be seen and will depend on the help I receive, and the time I can invest.
For the Qt 4.x version use GIT Here

Usability on-the-go …

So I was about to start creating the Disney slides, when I run into a snag which annoyed me enough to add another button to the KenBurnsDialog.
Since you do now have a context menu, which allows you to move images around, and remove them from the slideshow ( including undo ), I added the [Hide Preview] button.

Once the Preview is out of the way you see much more of your images from the slideshow. So you can better organize images, in case you missed something in the DialogImages dialog, which by the way is much better suited for this kind of organizing. But to avoid switching between dialogs, this button now makes your life easier.

I also completely reworked the ComplexDVD plug in for the FewClickWizard. The plug in is no 100% based on scripts. This will make it so much easier to adopt to the constantly changing web pages off which I get the background images, and vids.
The cool thing about this is that the GUI itself will build the controlls according to the scripts. f course, the scripts are now part of the install and if they are missing the ComplexDVD plug in is pretty useless

So I am happy with all the changes and with the fact, that I am now rendering the first slideshow using all the new features.

So it took me about 2 minutes and 12 seconds to organize 49 images, and assign both manual, and random KenBurns effects to all images. However it took me about one month to program all the required changes in …
Hahaha I am not too sure about the time saving effect of that one

But you know what, from here on out I will always save time creating a cool Slideshow.

I wish every one happy holidays and a happy new year.

2012, here I come.

Added ContextMenu

Ahhh yes, the nice KenBurnsDialog, I thought it was all good until I used it and I realized there were some features missing, which I promptly added in the form of ContextMenu.

Along the way I found one more thing I want to fix. Hmmm, I spend too much time with this …

KenBurns over and out.

I put up a short Youtube video about the KenBurns dialog, to show how it works.

I am now happy with the way the dialog works and will move on to do some bug fixing and see if I can get the number of crashes down while rendering previews in the background.

Some time this weekend I will start ( and hopefully finish ) the Disney DVD from our trip. If all goes well and I do not discover any more bugs during this process I will prep the next release for every one else to enjoy.

Complex KenBurns up and running.

So after playing with this the past couple of days I can now finally create KenBurns effects the way I wanted to.

This is great and sad. I have reached another milestone in QDVDAuthor, which should conclude all major features for a program like this. I firmly believe QDVDAuthor is still the best and most comprehensive DVD tool out there for Linux. It does a lot of things,

however there are other tools out there which do parts of what QDVDAuthor does, an they do them better. The beauty is to have the choice of which one to use. If I want to get really detailed about the Slideshows I want to create with a ton of effects, I would pick ManDVD2, or KDENLive. Throwing together a couple of hundred input files with mixed images and videos, and have a slideshow ready within minutes, I will use QDVDAuthor

What remains now is some code cleanup, bug fixing and finally creating that Disney DVD before I wrap all this up in the next release.

Final thought of the day.

I think of programming like the scene from “The Matrix” where Neo started to see the walls in numbers, when what we conceive as reality disappears in front of his eyes. You’ll become master of the known and a wizard of the imagination. Nothing can stop you.
One truth still remains, which is that of constant learning …

Basic KenBurns up and running.

So I checked in the latest changes to the KenBurns effort and it is working in its most basic form.

There is still a lot of work left to be done on the dialog but I am on track to finish this by the end of the weekend.

Hmmm, who’d thunk it would be so easy to do KenBurns …

Mid week … or almost

So I have been spending the mornings working on the KenBurns dialog.  I like the progress, and I hope I’ll be able to wrap this dialog up by the weekend.

I think it’ll be nice to get KenBurns after all those years. I am looking forward in rendering my Disney picture to a slideshow using KenBurns.

I have unfortunately not yet found any time to work on the Qt 4.x port. This is for any one interested.

The port is functional with tons of bugs to be fixed. You an find the code in the git repository.

The Qt 3.x version is ( and will stay ) in CVS.

Got to go and start my excercise now …

New weekend, new changes.

So I was trying to figure out why I can’t get my iPhone to properly render anymore.

Turns out, they never rendered properly in the first place. This escaped my attention because I never had an iPhone before. So it took me three full days ( well, the spare time of my days ) to finally find out how to properly use sws_scale under the hood and to fix it.

The result is that you should now be able to properly render vids inside the slideshow.

I also found a bug wrt the preview thumbs in the SlideshwDialog, which is odd since I know this has been working for me before, However looking at the code tis feature has been broken for the past 2 years.

So there you go another fix, which I diligently ported to the Qt 4.x port of QDVDAuthor.

I think the last major change I want to incorporate is going to be the KenBurns dialog. This is a dialog I started way back but I never found the spare time to implement. Since I am doing so many changes all around QDVDAuthor I think it is the right time to get this last, missing piece up and running.

I think he time around christmas will be ideal for me to do so.

On a personal note, I am happy to report that I have started another round of P90X. I did my last set of P90X about 1.5 years ago, ad it is about time to get me back into shape. Of course this means less time coding in QDVDAuthor …

Some more changes

I added a new feature today which I could have sworn I added a couple of years back. Maybe I did and lost the changes.

Anyhow, if you go into the DialogImages, or the DialogFiles dialog and click “Ok” without adding sources to a Group you will get asked if this was your intention or if you wanted to create E.g. a slideshow from the material in the preview.

This is a nice usability enhancement, as it prevents he user from loosing his (selection) work.

And on the way I also discovered some issues with the caching system which I fixed and you should get a nice performance boost from it too. If you use DialogFiles / DialogImages and you scan through a new folder with images.

The image_db.xml file is now only stored after all has been done, and not for every image you scan. There you go. Oh, and … You Are Welcome !

I also found that the current version of ffmpeg does not render the videos in between images properly, only the audio track appears in the final slideshow.

I will check this one out and hope I can fix it. Otherwise I will have to recommend using the ffmpeg 0.5 source tree.