Imagination is a lightweight and simple DVD slide show maker written in C language and built with the GTK+2 toolkit.

Imagination is a lightweight and simple DVD slide show maker written in C language and built with the GTK+2 toolkit. I noticed a lack of a user-friendly DVD slide show maker for GNU/Linux, so I started developing Imagination. True, there are some other GUIs which do the job, but they usually require a lot of dependencies to be installed first and often their interfaces are bloated. Imagination has been designed from the ground up to be fast, light and easy-to-use. It requires the ffmpeg encoder to produce the movie file and libsox to handle the audio. Yes you don't need any other third-party software, I like the KISS principle :)

Imagination at present features 69 transition effects, random function to automatically set a random transition on all the selected slides, cut/copy/paste ability on the slides, Ken Burns ability, text on the slides with some text animations, ability to add an empty slide with a gradient editor and export of the slideshow as OGV Theora/Vorbis, widescreen FLV video and 3GP for mobile phones.

Status.

The latest stable release of Imagination is 2.1 released on 14/10/09 featuring bug fixes, a new transition family named Rochade and a Slide Transitions Report Dialog reporting the number of slides which have the same transition applied.

Screenshots of release 2.1

The new 2.1 Slide Transition Report Dialog

The main window previewing Heart In transition effect

The main window with the new FLV export dialog

The new Add Empty Slide dialog with the gradient editor

The main window while exporting the slide show

The main window showing the Clock Wipe family transitions

F.A.Q.:

- How are transition effects applied?

Read Understanding Transitions document.

- Why there is no XYZ transition available?

Because we haven't written it yet. Our intention is to offer all transitions that are part of the SMIL 3.0 Specification but since there are a lot of them, this will take some time. If you really want XYZ transition, have a look at transition folder in source directory and create your own transition, send it to us and we'll do our best to get it included in next release of Imagination.

- What will happen if my audio files are too short or too long for video?

If your audio files are too short for slideshow, the end of the slideshow will simply be played in silence. If your audio files are too long, they will be truncated at the end of the slideshow. In the next release, audio will be smoothed before adding to slideshow.

- Why playing mp3 files on Fedora doesn't work?

Because Fedora supplies sox without support for mp3 (legal reasons). You'll need to build sox with mp3 support if you wish to preview mp3 files on Fedora.

- Is it possible to rearrange the order of the slides?

Sure, hold down left mouse button and move the slides then release it.

- I want to start my slideshow with a Fade-In transition, why don't you add it?

Because you already have it! Select the background color from the Properties menu and then apply the Cross-Fade effect on the first slide.

- I have Ubuntu and ffmpeg is installed but I get this error message from ffmpeg in the console: "Unknown encoder 'mpeg2video' "

Please install these packages:

libavcodec-unstripped-52                   3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu2+unstripped1 ffmpeg codec library
libavformat-unstripped-52                  3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu2+unstripped1 ffmpeg file format library
libavutil-unstripped-49                    3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu2+unstripped1 ffmpeg utility library
   

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