About P2VSS

Does your wife, yourself, or your significant other have thousands of pictures and videos stored away but not being enjoyed on a daily basis? This tools hopes to put recorded media and the memories they hold into a set of videos resized and smoothly sequenced for a specific display, framerate, and quality.

Github Repository Here

This is accomplished using a "hacky" set of scripts intended to prepare a set of pictures / videos for content on a digital picture frame. Click to see the demo below:

This project started when I purchased a digital picture frame, and found its build in scaling and configurations very poor. I started this "small" project to better format the collection of pictures and videos I had in the way I wanted so I could actually enjoy them.

While most digital picture frames do offer more settings than the frame that put me on this pilgrimage, I still believe having strict control of resizing method, transitions, display timings, and effects can help to better enjoy memories on display.

How to use

Currently, these scripts are written ad-hoc and without consistent consideration for Linux / Macintosh environments. This set of scripts is written in Powershell, but should be relatively easy to convert to Python or to fix the current Powershell scripts to work with unix path separators.

For Windows

Getting Ready

  1. Fork or download a copy of this repository (I would generally recommend forking so you can make tweaks if needed, or if you fix something you can create a PR to fix any relevant bugs in this repo)

  2. Install dependencies as needed.

    1. Option 1 - Run the "InstallDependencies.bat" script

    2. Option 2 - Manually download and install dependencies.

      1. ImageMagick for command line photo manipulation.

      2. FFMPEG for command line media manipulation.

      3. JPEG Lossless Rotator for command line picture rotation, note this tool is not required due to the current methods being used.

      4. Ensure environmental paths include all of these products, though that should occur automatically upon install.

  3. Highly encouraged - Create a RAM disk to run video creation processes through.

    1. I use AIM Toolkit

    2. This can significantly improve processing speed, as -in the default configuration- ImageMagick will create individual frames when converting images to video sequences which are then stitched together with ffmpeg. Keeping these frames on a RAM drive will significantly improve ffmpeg’s processing speed.

Customizing for your albums / pictures / content

  1. Open "BuildAlbum.ps1" and customize.

    1. If desired set the $SetTmpPath variable to a RAM drive path to make processing easier, else keep this blank so that temporary files are created and deleted in the default user space.

    2. At this point I would recommend running the "BuildAlbum.ps1" file to see if the test file is able to build without issue, as that will indicate all dependencies have been properly installed and that the temporary path -if applicable- is being utilized.

    3. $Names2Ig: Structure which defines which names / folders should be ignored when getting media files, and exceptions for this rule. For myself, I put everything into various "DNP" subfolders, so if I have originals or long videos I still want to keep, they aren’t brought into a digital picture frame.

      1. ExceptionParentFldrGreaterThan: Exception designation for ignore attributes, currently this is only designed to look at numbers in the parent folder, but gives a good idea of how other exceptions could be accommodated. In this instance, if any number in the parent folder of a file matching the ignore definition is greater than this value, it is NOT ignored.

    4. Scroll down to the comment "Define standard / non-test paths and configure the properties accordingly:

      1. "$InputFileRootPath": Update the folder path (which for many with a large picture / video collection hopefully is a network / NAS location.) If you don’t want to maintain a copy of your files, set this to an empty string array "".

      2. "$PrepFileRootPath": Update the folder path which defines where the input files will be copied to. This assumes you have enough space to copy over all the media files. If you do not want to copy your media, just set this to the actual root location where content is located.

      3. "ConvFileRootPath": Update the folder path which defines where the input images will be converted to (and only images). This is intended to apply additional corrections to the image, but nothing is currently implemented. This can remain empty "".

      4. "OutputFilePrepend": What folders will be called that actually contain the album content. These contain the images and videos that result in the actual final video.

      5. "OutputDefs": This structure is intended to contain an element for each display you want to export data to, with multiple configurations:

      6. XDim: The horizontal displayed resolution of the output video.

      7. YDim: The vertical displayed resolution of the output video.

      8. FPS: The framerate you want the video to run at.

      9. PicDispTime: How long you want pictures to be displayed for, not counting the fade times.

      10. MaxSrtRot: The start maximum rotation (in degrees) you want to be applied to a picture (the tool will start pictures at an angle, and rotate smoothly towards horizontal)

      11. FadeTime: The amount of time to fade between images / videos.

      12. BulkVidTimeMin: Roughly how long each final output video should be. If you want a single giant video, make this a very large number. As my pictures are named by date, I set this to 20 minutes, so I can go through my "life" of pictures from earliest to latest date all within 20 minutes, and each video will go through a different set of pictures. This way it doesn’t keep showing pictures from the same event over and over again.

      13. NameMethod: I only support my method "FldrLvl2" which names folders by their 2nd folder deep name if available. Otherwise a default is used. This doesn’t impact the output video, just the intermediary files, as I was -at one point- thinking to add text to the videos to describe what they were showing.

      14. ImgVidFldr: When images are converted to videos, they are saved in a subfolder matching this name. There should be no need to change this.

      15. Quality: This is the "quality" number (crf), Lower values result in higher quality images, but they consume more space. In general, I find values under 20 are overkill, but it will be a balance depending on the number of files you have, and the storage media you use to deploy those to frames.

      16. ExpAud: THIS CURRENTLY DOES NOT WORK AND SHOULD STAY AS 0. Intended to be set if audio should be in the final videos. In general, you would probably want this 0 to disable any audio inclusion anyways.

      17. CleanBuild: Generally for debugging only, as it will cause all previously converted media to get wiped out. This is only really useful for testing, which is what I added it for.

Running

Run as you would any other powershell script. You can simply run "BuildAlbum.bat" from the root folder (as admin) to also call the ps1 file, and verify (as long as you haven’t changed the test flag) that all processes operate. The output file for the current test configuration will be located in the folder "AlbumOut1440x900q30-Groups"

To run your configuration, change $UseTestPath to a value of 0.