Impress - keep presentations on a loop

[marcosramos]

I was asked to have some old computers with some presentations on a loop.
The first things I thought of:
- I have old computers for that, will install Linux on them;
- Will use OpenOffice Impress for the shows (so I dont have to convert to AVI/SWF for example);

I've opened this topic because I read some discussions about Linux opening OpenOffice only with or without X and so on.

Any of you guys had similar task?

I'm thinking of:
- Set up Impress to load on a loop different presentations with a shell script to queue the presentations in one directory;
- Have another shell script in cron, for example, to check a specific directory on a fileserver where one or more users can upload presentation, updating would be easier;

Got any ideas? Know how to do this?
Thanks!

[acknak]

I think you're going to have to ask a more specific question.

Can it be done? Yes.

Is it a good way to do it? Who can say without more information?

How to do it? How to do what, exactly?

[marcosramos]

Putting it simple:

Have a computer loop presentations only. The less resource consumer possible...

[marcosramos]

I'm launching presentations using the soffice -show presentation.odp
When I quit the presentation (with Escape) and close OO Impress, it shows up a recovery window that opens Writer with an untitled empty document.

This on a Ubuntu 7.04 - OOo 2.2 on a powerfull Pentium III with 256mb RAM
The issue is: why does it show the recovering dialog?

[acknak]

Are you using the OO.org package, or a Ubuntu package?

Are you required to use OOo 2.2?

I suggest that you try the current package from OO.org before you try to debug something else.

If you like, post your presentation somewhere (attach below if less than 128k; otherwise use a file sharing site), and others can try to see if the problem is specific to your setup.

[marcosramos]

I use the Ubuntu Version that comes with the CD, just installed.

The file opens in OO 2.3.1 no problem.

[chromium]

This was an issue in Ubuntu 7.04 (Ubuntu-specific). It has been fixed (still in 7.04), so I guess you did not update your current installation yet.

[marcosramos]

sorted out a solution... launching soffice -show with the extra -nocrashreport and -norestore...

How can I get a full list of those arguments?

[acknak]

soffice -help

[marcosramos]

well tryed to play 2 shows one after the other... without any luck

simpress -show pres1.odp pres2.odp opens both...


can they be merged automaticly?

[acknak]

No--I expect you can only show one at a time.

You can loop two presentations using the shell:

while true
do
soffice -show pres1.odp
soffice -show pres2.odp
done

Oh, wait. That's not going to work either, because of that stupid "Click to end" slide. Well, you might get it to work that way, if you kill the OOo show after a set time, or add a macro that exits OOo, or some hack like that. Uggh.

Well, I'm out of ideas, other than simply editing the two shows together into one presentation.

[marcosramos]

After some thinking, what do you think of this:

- Exporting all presentations as PDF;
- People upload the presentations to a fileserver;
- A cron script merges all PDF's (I know at least one tool for that) and create an SWF (there is also a tool to create SWF from PDFs);
- Play the SWF fullscreen with some kind of 1 frame every 10 seconds;

Of course the presentations are exported to PDF with OpenOffice...
Maybe I can use some headless OOo setup to do that conversion automatically (from odp or ppt files)...

I'm lacking of ideas to do it...
Thank you for the help... Keep the ideas coming...

[acknak]

That should work, but it sounds pretty complicated.

If you go through PDF you will lose all animations and transitions. If that's acceptable for you, you might as well just export the slides as images and use a simple image viewer that loops over all images in a directory (including images in subdirectories). There are lots of scriptable image viewers around, if there's not one that loops the way you need.

I think that would all be easily done with software off the shelf, and less conversions would be simpler.

You could also export to swf from Impress--oh, but I guess there's no viewer that will cycle through all the files the way you want.

[marcosramos]

well that SWF could work... a lot of media players get SWF as a video file format... and most of them have playlist support... thus, a script to generate a playlist from time to time, then, if the playlist is updated, kills the current player process and launches another one...

PDF or SWF the animations go away with OOo Impress..

The best would be odp or ppt and playlist them...