Hi. Been experimenting since my last post.
You do not specify what your final output medium will be, i.e. do you only want something that can play on computers or do you want a disk you can pop into your dvd player and share with your friends as they sit around your TV drinking merlot?
If it is simply for computer output, then Irfanview will do the job quickly, no frills but you'll have background music and the pics will scroll by. You can save your pics as a stand alone exe file which works superbly. You can even save it as a screen saver, both work well.
I have also had a look at windows video maker. The only advantage to this would be the added benefits of titles, credits and transition effects. For ease, set the default time you want to display each photo before adding them, other wise you will spend hours trying to do so manually for each picture.
You can do this under
<tools>
<options>
-advanced-
Again this plays superbly on the pc. Unfortunately as far as I can see you can only save your work in wmv format which limits playback to windows media player. I tried my disc in three different dvd players, from the cheap and nasty to the very expensive, and not one could play the cd. Even a DVD player sporting the windows logo.
Now if you want to play this on a tv, then I think you will have to look at something a little more upmarket. But here is what I came up with:
Irfanview does have an option to burn to cd and create a video cd. You must have nero burner installed. I did a trail, but sadly could not get the sound to work
This may because I only have nero express as apposed to the full version. The quality was not very good either.
I then tried the NTI CD & DVD Maker gold version 6, which was packaged with my acer laptop. This proved easy following the prompts, however the quality was very poor. It did not even look good on my 13 inch tv, so would hate to see it on anything bigger.
I then used CyberLink PowerProducer 2 Gold which came packaged with my LG external DVD writer. Here I hit pay dirt. It has a similar interface as windows movie maker. I did not spend time messing with transitions so I don't know if it has these. But it has three advantages over the other software:
1. Seperate albums can be made
2. A nifty feature which adjusts the viewing time of photos to the length of the track you are playing in the background.
3. It creates a VCD which will play in most DVD players.
You can also create rather nice menues and there are lots of other options which I never looked at. The quality was also not bad.
For these projects I used 150 photos so there appears to be no limit.
The average size was 30mb which is small enough.
I am not sure if CyberLink PowerProducer 2 Gold is easily available. I have used it to make excellent DVD movies in the past. As this is not the full version I would expect even greater things from the commercial product available in stores. So you may want to invest a bit of your wild life collection (South African thing, all our money has wild animals on). As for the version I used, it came packaged with my LG DVD writer.
Anyway I hope this has been usefull.