Monday 15 December 2008

Media MVP Slideshow

I want to create a simple slideshow viewer for the Hauppauge Media MVP.
The user interface has to be simple, requiring no intervention other than powering up, because it is for our Autistic son and he does not press buttons. I am intending to make a really big bright, easy to press button for him to power on the unit, and it will shutdown after a set period.

Mvpmc almost does what I want, but you have to use the remote control to select an image to display before it will go into slideshow mode. I am not keen on the mvpmc code - it has lots of 'modules' to do different functions, but the code is all interwoven, so it takes a bit of un-picking. Therefore I thought I would go for something simpler. Fbi is a simple frame buffer image viewer which should do the trick. After much messing about I got it to compile, but unfortunately it complained that the MVP /dev/fb0 was not behaving like a standard linux frame buffer. I gave up on fbi at this point and decided that un-picking the mvpmc code would be easier - at least I know it is capable of displaying images.

I updated main.c and gui.c in mvpmc to add a new command line startup option --startup slideshow:file=.

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