diascope: home

Diascope

Diascope is a slideshow generator for the Linux command line.
It creates photo shows with music, ready to publish on the web or to burn onto a DVD.
  • April 30th, 2016
    • Maintenance release diascope 0.2.1e is out.
    • Updated ffmpeg syntax for mpeg4 export
    • Updated installer
    • Note for users of Debian Linux or derived systems such as Ubuntu: you must install the GNU awk interpreter (gawk) for diascope to work.
  • January 2nd, 2015
  • August 18th, 2014
  • Older releases

Features

Back to top

How it works

  • Create a slideshow
    • Diascope takes a text file with the description of your slideshow: images, durations, transitions, audio etc. After processing the description diascope creates a shell script containing the necessary commands to generate a slideshow, and then executes the script. You can watch the progress indicators and wait for your slideshow.
  • Reuse your bits in recycling mode
    • Diascope renders all frames and sounds to the harddisk and keeps track of its files. If you modify the slideshow description file diascope will only reprocess the changes and save you waiting time. The downside is, of course, that you need free harddisk space: approximately 1.7 GB for one minute of PAL video.
    • To determine what has changed, diascope compares the current description file to the one used for the previous run. It attempts to map as many of your previous actions and transitions to the new slideshow as possible to avoid unnecessary re-rendering. The underlying algorithm tries to find the best matches but it is not very clever.
Back to top

Requirements and Credits

  • Diascope requires the following great open source projects to be installed
    • sox for audio conversion, fades and concatenation
    • ImageMagick for all image manipulations
    • ffmpeg for the audio/video encoding
    • gawk for what's left to interpretation
    • GNU/Linux, although diascope may run on comparable systems, too.
  • Reaaly handy tools for use along with diascope
    • ppmfilter from the smilutils and pnmsplit from netpbm for fast luma rendering (see diascope's INSTALL file for instructions)
    • The Gimp's crop dialogue to determine crop specifications
  • Credits
    • The example movies on this site are displayed using the flv player by Jeroen Wijering.
    • Thanks to Charles Yates for accepting a ppmfilter patch to address diascope's needs
Back to top