AVS Picture Viewer/Slideshow

Wondering has it ever been done?
An AVS picture viewer with say settings for folders and/or subfolders of pics. Able to choose delay and maybe some transitions etc.
Set it up and away you go. Play your music with a little picture slideshow happening in the AVS window. Resizable too.

enabled gadgets on Win 7 and using slideshow. Does job.

Also keeps Winamp from using up RAM keeping images in active memory.

(almost) not possible, AVS only allows single images. You'd have to select every image manually and make an effect list for each photo.

like noted above, there's better ways to go about doing it (e.g. album art plug-in or hijacking the video window) then trying to hack up something with AVS (and is really overkill for displaying effectively static images).

Well, you can't do that (there's not an APE which allows to load more than one picture) but you can work around it by using an effect list per image.
Something like this, good thing I learned megabufs

Forget my last comment, it is possible. I still recommend any other method to save your CPU, but for completeness sake, here's how to do it in AVS:
I just remembered the rare slideshow.ape, which was made just for this. Here's an example and the ape. Don't forget to change the path to your desired folder! I hope it works on your windows+winamp+avs version.
I tested with Linux Mint 17/Wine1.6.2, Winamp 5.666.3516, and AVS 2.81d+2.83 and it worked as expected.

WOTL can you explain a little more what to do for us mere mortals who don't know too much about avs workings? How do I set it up? I added the files to avs folder but no go

In order to work, that preset requires an APE (AVS plug-in Effect) called slideshow.ape which is kinda like an extra effect.

You may check this thread for a list of some interesting APEs. Once you downloaded the APE you need, simply extract it onto your AVS folder then run AVS, job done 🙂

And there's the AVS FAQ thread if you need more info about AVS.

I'm still confused.
I think the slideshow.ape IS included in the WotL - slideshow.zip above.
I added the slideshow.ape into avs folder with the wotl slideshow.avs. That didn't work (blank screen when I choose that preset) so I moved the slideshow.ape file into the plugins folder. Still no go.

Also how do I edit the address to my pictures

I know it is included, I was just telling you how to make APEs work properly.

Have you changed the path for the pictures? There's a button right next the pathname, try to choose a folder that contains images (by the way, iirc the APEs need to be extracted inside the AVS folder, not outside)

button?
Are you saying there is some sort of interface because I can't see it.
I looked in the slideshow.avs using notepad and find this

should I just adjust that path? It has some wierd charactors..

Nullsoft AVS Preset 0.2 lúQVFX FRAMERATE LIMITER 
 ! 

:
pSlideshow U

Z:\home\luuk\Afbeeldingen\Screensaver\1080
Öν + e
 x=x+sx;
y=y+sy $ sx=(rand(4)-2)/w;
sy=(rand(4)+2)/h

Dude, you need to open Winamp first 🙂 then launch AVS

tried that
I see the avs when I right click on the avs window choose
wotl slideshow nothing happens

ok found how. on the case

whoohoo. Love it
I will be rewriting these instructions. Lol
It doesn't do subfolders though.
Any chance of fixing that?

And how do I get it to just be say a traditional slideshow with crossfade.
Not possible?
And random pics?

Ok worked out how to just get it as normal pics with no effects.
Still would like
random option
subfolders
nice crossfade.

Possible?

You'll get featured and thanked at the Winamp Enthusiasts Group.
:-)

so I take it this can't be done. I know nothing about AVS.
I have tried all sorts of tweaks I can think of but can't get it to do
random pics
include subfolders
nice crossfade

I'd be willing to give a donation to whoever can do it if it's not a huge effort to do.

Been testing this for 3 or 4 days running continually and no issues to report.
To get what I wanted I did the following:
Put all the pics into one folder named Winamp Slideshow
Resized them all to 800px to hopefully improve performance.
Got a randomize bat script and ran it in the folder to random rename the files.
I can live with the no crossfade.
So job done.
I now have a folder with all my special pics randomly named and an awesome slideshow.
I think this APE is under rated. Excellent.

Here's my desktop

I'm curious what Windows task manager says is Winamp's peak working set memory usage after you've displayed all your pics. You may need to select that attribute column from the TM's View menu. How many pics are you using?

2,800 pics each approx 60kb in size.
Winamp runs perfectly with it running 24/7. I haven't had it off.
Using Win 7 64bit.
110,000k in memory.
Seems to use as much as a normal vis in my opinion.
That's just my gut feeling using the PC whilst it's on. No noticeable slowness at all.
:-)

Thank you. That memory usage seems low, but it is well within what Windows can allocate for a 32-bit app, so you shouldn't have any performance issues.

My configuration uses 166,480K at startup, just displaying 1 album art image. I only have 6,357 songs in my collection, each with an embedded image. When I run thru all my unique album art images, peak usage climbs to 745,088K. This is still well within what Windows can allocate.

Displaying images thru AVS must be using memory differently than when Winamp is displaying album art.

the library artwork view is a completely different beast to this or even the classic albumart plug-in so they're not comparable when it comes to resource usage. as it's most likely just loading the one image (with a bit of overlap with usage for the prior image) compared to accessing a whole collection of files and needing to display multiple things - the more you have to display, the more memory is going to be used.

and it's more often large continuous memory blocks which is the issue than just being enough space in what a 32-bit program can access by design (which is what affects the library behaviour far more than just having enough free memory when dealing with large library collections).

That all makes sense re album art plugin vs avs slideshow.
I'm happy. This works really well.

Attached..This is the best I have been able to modify the avs to look like a traditional slideshow.
Can anyone help improve with say a very slow pan or zoom for each image or similar? Open to any other ideas..
Or am I stuck with this being the best that can be done considering that avs is not designed for a slideshow effect as such?

sorry for not being here earlier, real life and all.
There should be a way to crossfade within the .ape file but I can't find any documentation about which variables to use.
Could you share your randomizing batchfile for other people who perhaps would like this as well? I'm working on a different solution for crossfading but my coding skills - for as far as I ever had those - are quite rusty.

No probs at all.
I found the bat here.

Very simple. Add it to the folder of pics.
Execute and type in ok to proceed.
Wait a few seconds.
Remove the bat file if you want.
Job done.

had some ideas for crossfading, but they didn't look alright. With some clever buffer tricks and alphablending it should be possible but I can't wrap my head around it right now.
in case anyone's interested, here's what I've got so far:

ah well. Appreciate you trying anyway WotL

BTW. This is the best I was able to get your original one. I added a small border to get rid of the jagged bottom of pics that was there. Prob a small bug in the APE.
It's pretty close to good.