Lin Evans

Some ISP's (mine, for example) won't host .exe files on their servers for security reasons. As long as your ISP allows you to store .exe file then it's up to the person who downloads to deal with the possibility of getting an exe through the various potential filters from anti-virus programs resident on their own PC. One way of getting around this is to rename the .exe file to .ex and remind the person who downloads to change the file extension back to .exe. Most, but of course not all users have enough familiarity with their systems to rename a file - that is providing they actually read the note telling them to do so. I've tested this on major forums and about 10% respond with "I can't get the slideshow to run" and the reason is invariably that they failed to read the note to rename the file. Best regards, Lin

Hi Rick, If you think the text effects in ProShow Gold are "unmatched" then you haven't used Media@Show which has the best text effects of any slideshow by a considerable margin. If you check out slideshow "contests" you will find more than an average amount of winners are using P2E rather than ProShow Gold. Mark's slideshows don't come close to some which have been done with P2E. Absolutely PSG is the present affordable king of DVD producing slideshows but you can do things with PicturesToExe which simply can't be done with ProShow Gold because of the object handling ability. You've been away too long from P2E - there are some amazing new capabilities. Best regards, Lin

Actually, you don't burn .exe files to a DVD unless you intend to play the DVD in a computer. The executable format doesn't work in DVD players. I suspect you mean an auto-running DVD slideshow which is essentially a "movie" format. If that's the case it works well with ProShow Gold but you can make the same type slideshow with P2E by using the output to AVI feature then using another program such as Ulead DVD Movie Factory to convert and burn the AVI to DVD format. Lin

That might work, but why not use "Royalty Free" music? There are hundreds of thousands of incredibly good royalty free selections available. All, of course have copyrights but you pay only once to use as many times and as often as you wish for any but broadcast purposes. Lin

Why not just get the original zip program written by Paul Katz (PKZip)? It's $29 and still the best there is in my experience: http://www.pkware.com/ Lin

You could also just change the extension to .ex (drop the final e) and tell the party you email it to that they can rename it to "filename.exe". Lin

With Pan/Zoom/Rotate effects - no need for Flash :-) The suggestion for Flash was to allow these effects without building them into P2E, but having them built in is better anyway - thanks!! Lin

Hi Brian, That's a solution, but not the same as what I have in mind. I can copy the .pte file to a CD or DVD but that's just like putting it on the hard disk where it already resides, in other words just moving it from one storage location to another. The point is to have the .pte embedded "with" the .exe so that anywhere the .exe file ends up it's "always" possible to extract the information for updates or changes. I don't keep copies of files for my customers and they may or may not have the CD or DVD or Zip disk or Magneto Optical media or however the file was delivered to them three or four years from now. Since the slideshow is self-contained in the .exe file, the user may have moved it a dozen times in migration from one system to another by the time I see it again. Copying the template to the distribution media just isn't a viable solution. If the .pte file stays with the .exe file as an embedded part which can always be retrieved it will never be lost or separated. Best regards, Lin

The likely culprit is the video card. When a transition is timed the assumption is that the CPU, drive and video can "keep up" with the programmed speed but that's not always the case. I've had situations exactly like the one you describe where I actually timed the transitions with a stopwatch on different systems and on systems with slow hard drives and mediocre video speed the images would lag behind the sound so that the timing was off. For example when you have a fast transition and the video can't effect that transition in the time you have programmed then defacto the sound will be ahead of the video and there is really no solution except for a faster system. The problem from a programmer's perspective is that you must have the "expectation" that the system is capable of doing what you ask in the alloted time. Unfortunately this is not always the case. It would be ideal if you could test the show on the system you intend to use it on and if necessary install P2E on that system and adjust it accordingly. This issue is not related to PicturesToExe but common to any slideshow program which synchronizes music to images and has transiions. Best regards, Lin

Yes, Granot's program is essentially a screen capture utility which captures the screen content and gives each image slide sequential names, but this won't help with all the information contained in the pte file. The utility for this type information would be very helpful because it would contain all transition effects, timings, paths to files, etc. I can see lots of situations where this would be incredibly useful and if offered as an optional choice when creating the executable there would be no down side.... Lin

I had a situation arise where I needed to revise a slideshow created for a customer a few years ago on P2E. The .pte file has long since been discarded so to do this I had to dig up the original photos and start from scratch. This led me to wonder if it were possible to embed the .pte file in the executable in such a way that it could be recovered by some "switch" filename.exe/recoverpte or something similar. This would make it much easier to re-create then modify the show because all relative information would be permanently embedded in the executable??? Lin

I'm wondering whether this Ken Burns effect couldn't be implemented by providing some sort of internal Flash engine which could then implement Flash files? It's relatively easy to make Flash "movies" of stills by various available software. Then if P2E could provide a way of displaying these within a slideshow it would be possible to achieve results like this: http://www.lin-evans.net/re/buffalo.html Lin

If you are seriously running a business and want to treat it as such, you need a professional solution like ImageRazor Pro (link below). Have a look at their video and I think you will see why it is designed to do exactly what you're asking for. P2E is a fantastic slideshow program but it wouldn't make a lot of sense to go off on tangents and be a "half" solution for something which is already well covered.... Lin http://www.imagefire.com/

Hi Ken, Isabel, Thanks - it's nice to get back here and catch up on all the fantastic improvements Igor has made in P2E! It's definitely become "the" slideshow program in my opinion.... Isabel, glad you enjoyed the show. Jon's art is without a doubt something to behold. I'm absolutely astounded each time I examine a new piece. I used to use a strong magnifying glass to view it, but now I just photograph it so I can enjoy all the intricate details and wonder at the patience his technicians in Bali must have to assemble it all.

I had the opportunity to make a slide show for a client on the Fiore Polymer Clay art of Jon Stuart Anderson. Jon is world renowned as an artist and considered the best at the Fiore process. Fiore Polymer Clay begins life as a colored piece about the size of a large loaf of bread. These are called "canes". The artist fabricates an intricate design as a sculpture would then stretches the clay over and again until the designs are tiny - some almost microscopic. The long piece of art is then sliced like pickle chips with a surgical scalpel and the intricate tiny "tiles" of design are pressed on a wooden or clay model. This model with hundred and even thousands of tiny polymer "tiles" is then baked and the polymer tiles expand to form a contiguous design of intricate detail and exquisite beauty. In the case of Jon's art the clay models used as a base are "spirit" animals, birds, fish, etc. Glass or polymer eyes, etc., are affixed and the object is finished with an ultra fine grit abrasive until it's as smooth as a piece of glass. There is absolutely no paint on Jon's art. Each piece of the intricate design is colored polymer clay. The finished pieces are relatively expensive and highly collectible as art. Each year Jon produces two new animals but this year only one - the buffalo (American Bison). The art objects range in size from about 1.5 inches to six inches and for snakes around 14 inches. Here's a link where you can download the slideshow with background music. It's nothing complex, just an example of how P2E can be used in conjunction with my photos of the art and PhotoShop, etc., to produce a tribute to this artist. Click on the link below and download the file "andersonart.ex" One you have the file, rename it to "andersonart.exe" and it will run. I had to drop the "e" from the file extension to satisfy my server's requirement for no executable files resident. About 10 megabytes so broadband suggested.... Best regards, Lin http://www.lin-evans.net/shows/andersonart.ex

Hi Barb, There is no way to do this directly. The best you can do is to capture the individual screen frames then use them to create your DVD show either by using P2E which can output an AVI file which can be converted by other software such as Ulead DVD Movie Factory or by inputing these screens into your other program. Granot, a frequent contributor here has graciously provided a dontaionware program which can easily capture each frame. Here's his link. You may download the program called RestorePTE located near the bottom. Use the scroll bar to scroll down and look for the above file to download. http://www.thailandphotoalbum.com/ Lin

I don't know about "freeware" but here's a link to one which works very well for $19.95 Lin http://www.audioutilities.com/video-to-mp3...ideo-to-mp3.htm

Hey Granot, Are you sure it isn't "ShowVideoPte"? Doesn't the ShowVideoPte work with mpg's, etc., called from a slide or menu and the FlashVideoExe work with Flash and video before the slideshow begins :-) Best regards, Lin

Hi Granot, In each slideshow which I produce there are credits to the developers and programs used at the beginning of the show and links to their sites from my website. I'll be glad to change the skin back to include the original but then I won't be able to use it. People outside of this forum and few others have any idea what "PTE" means and it would simply create confusion. When the "about" button is clicked it links to your website and when the user links to my website from the menu your site and a "plug" are included in my own links. Let me know if this doesn't work for you and I'll stop using your menu program. Here's a link to my own site: http://www.lin-evans.net Click on the "links" and read the information on the right side of the opening screen.... Best regards, Lin

Cool! I like the texture - I didn't change the texture on my "revision" but did change the "face" to personalize it like this: http://www.lin-evans.net/sample/skinsample.jpg Lin

Yes, thank's very much Granot!! That's exactly what I had in mind. Ken, I think that Granot said he can't do the same with the playlist window - that was my other request. Apparently that one can't be changed but having the option of inserting your own jpg in the lower window adds a lot. Best regards, Lin

Just a little addendum to everything said: Even if you don't make a slideshow for DVD, it's certainly possible to save your slideshows to a DVD and run them on the computer just as you do slideshows on CD's. The advantage, of course, is that if your executable exceeds the capacity of a CD or if you have numerous slideshows you are calling from a single menu you can take advantage of the much greater capacity of the DVD. An autorun.inf command will start and run an executable slideshow from a DVD just as it does on a CD. Best regards, Lin

First, congrats on a great menu program! I was wondering if it were possible to provide a means of allowing a background jpg to float behind the white screen where the list of file names is written? I assume that your code replaces the white area which appears on the skin.jpg with an identical backdrop for the text when the executable calls the skin? A watermark type background with a scenic just showing behind the text would look nice here, but if I substitute the white area with such it dissapears when the executable is run so my assumption is that it's being overwritten. Same for the green where the .txt files appear? Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, That works great! But if ths executable being called is not a P2E slideshow there is no way to access the internal code to run the "menu" again. I'm not certain how others use P2E but we often call video shows or other executables which were not created with P2E. The menu's generated by P2E are very quick and easy to create so are great as long as we don't try to run music. Even when we use two P2E executables - call them Menu1.exe and Menu2.exe which are essentially duplicates except for the inclusion of a "resume music" button which calls the opposite menu. The only problem comes when someone accidentally clicks on the "resume music" button twice and both end up running simultaneously with music from each starting at different times :-) We can use MultiMedia builder to build the menus with sound so that it's not really a big thing, but if it were an easy feature to add to P2E it would be nice to have. Best regards and congratulations on what I think is the best slideshow software available! Lin

Hi Igor, Thanks! That works great as long as the object being called (executable) is a P2E slideshow, but if the executable is from another program or a video show, etc., there is no way to access their internal code to open the menu again. Thanks, Lin