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=
