Image and Video Slideshow combo

I would shy away from using the built-in slideshow feature component. Namely because - pressing forward and back on the remote tends to lose count of the current image, the buffering is for 5 images and if you move around too quick it fails to buffer correctly, etc etc. If you are mixing in videos, why not use the roImageCanvas to do the slideshow and then clear and draw the videos, and go back to drawing images when you want?

viewtopic.php?f=34&t=26387&start=0&hilit=roslideshow

Thanks for the info on roSlideShow, I was unaware of this limitation.

Luckily, my application does not require that the user be able to use the forward and back functions. It will just display the images and videos in order continuously.

Any other thoughts on using both roSlideShow and roVideoScreen together?

no reason why you couldn't call video playback function from your slideshow function, but you would need to know somehow that it was time to launch the video player, so you would need to track your position in the slide show and know for example if you are on the 4th slide, that you need to launch a video player, and then return and show the 5th slide.

- Joel

"abdpromotions" wrote:
Thanks for the info on roSlideShow, I was unaware of this limitation.

Luckily, my application does not require that the user be able to use the forward and back functions. It will just display the images and videos in order continuously.

Any other thoughts on using both roSlideShow and roVideoScreen together?

Is there a way to disable the right, left, and pause buttons in the roSlideshow component? I thought it worked like other standard preprogramed screens like roGridscreen, which handle most all buttons within the component itself. If you can't disable the buttons, then you know users with itchy/'tweeker' trigger fingers are going to be abusing the buttons to try to change displayed images before they are loaded....

That is why destruk suggested using roImageCanvas, you have control that way.

Joel

I finally got this to run well.

I have added a variable to the xml file that identifies each file as an image or a video and it plays them accordingly. The goal was to show this slide show repeatedly, and its working well. I also managed to create a refresh time in the XML file that instructs the script to reload the XML file ever hour in case the images have changed.

This brings me to a fundamental problem. The images are loaded to cache and not reloaded every time. This works well because I do not need to refresh these images unless the XML file is changed. The video however loads every time it is called. This is going to put a strain on my server, and its also annoying to the viewer to see the [Retrieving...] message all of the time.

Is there any way to load short videos into RAM (like the images in DeviantArt) instead of reloading them every time they are called?

Any help is appreciated.

You could download them to tmp
Then play them from the tmp directory. They will still have to be downloaded to the roku every time the channel is ran as it clears out tmp storage on exit.

I am working on this now. Do you know what the size limitation of tmp is? Is this automatically extended if I insert an SD card, or do I need to send it to the card in a different manner?

SD card probably won't extend the size of tmp. Available space is determined by the amount of memory in the device (which varies by device) and how many channels are installed.

- Joel

Yes, tmp space is variable depending on a lot of things. Also, the memory used by tmp is the same memory used by the video player, so you have more tmp space if you don't play video. In your case, you want tmp and to play video, so I wouldn't count on having more than a very few megabytes of tmp space.

--Mark