Slideshow VCD

[Kestrel]

What is the easiest way for create a VCD slideshow with very little quality loss from approximately 4000 stills? I read the one in the how-to, but I am hoping that someone else has found an easier way. I'm using OSX, I have cleaner 5, qt pro, iMovie, iPhoto and Graphic Converter. There has got to be a way to do this with the above, but I have yet to figure it out. GC doesn't work by itself because it doesn't add a soundtrack, iMovie quality sux, the files are not in a series type naming system, so QT pro doesn't recoginze it, and I haven't figured out iPhoto yet. Any ideas?

Thanks

[major]

As you may know, the VCD standard supports up to 1980 hi-res stills on a single CD (at 704x576 size) and so it should be the eldorado of any digital camera user wanting to simply stock lot of photos and easily see them on TV. However, there is almost no mac program to create them! The lone exception seems to be Query VCDMaker Professional, which is very difficult to find; it includes a tool named "MpegView" to create hi-res MPEG stills and "Movement" to author a hi-res slideshow VCD. PC folks use this tool and commercial programs incorporating VCD still functionality. Under OSX you may eventually succeed to create MPG stills by using MJPEG Tools, then you can go with VCDImager (and so VCDToolsX) to author a hi-res stills VCD slideshow, but I don't know of any simple interface to automate this process (Ross.. what do you think about this project?

[Ross]

Well, when Kestrel opened this topic, the gears started turning.

I have updated and tested mpeg still capability with MissingMpegTools (not posted yet, watch for next rev).

MissingMenuGen would be needed to set the play back control, but for large batches, maybe I could put together a custom script.