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Wow! No more jump at the end of slideshow while scrolling outside the visible area! Thank you Igor! Umberto.

Since PTE 5.6 has introduced the new "Run slideshow" feature, and given that this feature needs a perfect version compatibility between all slide exes involved, it could be really helpful some kind of macro recompilation that lets the user choose many projects and automatically iterates all projects recompiling them. I understand that this function is useful especially when Igor is releasing a new beta and maybe it could be useless when 5.6 will be stable and released, but given that my show is more than 10 interlinked exes this can be of really use just to ensure everything has been recompiled and none of the involved exes has been forgot. Regards. Umberto.

Just tested problems signaled on b12. Everything looks working great now for what i see. Thank you Igor! Umberto.

Igor, Testing my slideshow with beta 12 i got the error in the screenshot. I launch my menu.exe that has many clickable choices with "Run slideshow with return". After clicking a choice (the sub slideshow starts) and pressing ESC the error appears and after that the player exits. This happens always on my machine (Vista). Another issue happens when I recompile all my sub slideshows. When I do this, since they are many, I repeadetly press CTRL+O, open the project file, F9 and repeat for 10-15 times. Sometimes after opening a file an Array out of bounds exception happens, but PTE does not crash and still works after the message. Regards. Umberto.

I know this should be filed in the ideas forum, but maybe it can be viewed also like a small "bug"? I have a menu that shows all the menu items floating over a scrolling map. The scroll is 120 seconds length from bottom-right to top-left. After all the map has panned i wish to repeat the pan from the start. I discovered that if I set the "loop this slide" option, the pan restarts but it's jerky because there is no fading from the end of the slide to the new start. Instead of setting "loop this slide", if i set "repeat show until ESC is pressed" i achieve my result, since my menu is a single slide and with this option i obtain the fading at each repeat. But... I would really appreciate an option that will enable the fading also in the "loop this slide" mode. So i can build a menu with sub-menu slides and an animation on each slide that can be faded at each repeat of the slide. I think this should not be too hard to insert into next beta. What do you think? Regards.... Umberto.

Igor, I understand that PTE converts everything to relative paths, but I hope that also writing "Slideshows\Show1.exe" will work in future since if i have very long paths I get confused when checking them in the PTE interface. Anyway, yesterday I done some testing on Run slideshow with return command (not as deep ad Peter's), and now I feel like a child with a new toy, geeeeh! Regards. Umberto.

Igor, I mean if, after returning to the calling slideshow, there is the possibility to specify if the calling slideshow will restart from zero, or stay where it was previous the run command or go to another slide. This should be specified in the calling slideshow of course. I suppose that this would let build more flexible menus. It was only a hint... Regards. Umberto

Igor, These are great news. I look forward to test this new version. Did you implement also some kind of "after sub-slideshow" behaviour? Regards. Umberto.

This may sound strange... Say that I designed a show that will be delivered to many people. Everybody will see the show with his own hardware. So the show may be go well (as I espect people should see it) or bad (jerky animations because of poor hardware). What about something to let the user know that his hardware is ok for seeing the show? Say that I wish people know this, and run the show on my hardware saying that i wish 60fps. So when the user launches the show, a fast hw test is performed and he is been said that his hw is ok or his hw can perform the show at 50% the performance required. So users will know that some jarkiness can be caused by the hw, and not by me or pte The only problem is to design a hw test that can understand if the hw can perform this specific show... well I don't know. What do you think? Regards. Umberto.

When I went to theatre to present the show I attached the laptop to the theatre digital projector. All pannings were awful and i feared the show would be a catastrophe. Fortunately we carried our projector, the one we used to test the show. After connecting the same laptop to our projector the show went silky smooth. I don't know the cause, but I suppose that projector makes the difference. Regards. Umberto.

I agree with you Ian. This kind of "fault tolerance" would be welcome when running shows produced by different people. Moreover, the possibility to return to the menu without changing the called shows it's really needed when many people cooperate to build one single production. I think also that an "after run slideshow" behaviour (say: restore to pre-launch point, restart menu, go to slide and so on) could be useful. I would prefer the "restore to pre-launch point" behaviour as default, because this is the behaviour that 5.5 has. So an unchanged slideshow project would behave the same both in 5.5 and 5.6 (well, changing only run application to run slideshow) Regards. Umberto.

Pedro, Technically very well done. Regards. Umberto

Peter, Personally, I fear the need of building duplicates of the shows because one is embedded in a menu and the other is stand alone. I fear too the weirdness of configuring into menu.exe the run slideshow with a parameter stating that menu.exe must be launched after... too much assembly like, you know I don't say that this should not be implemented (anyway it's weird) but I feel that the "nesting" concept should be considered. And lets the menu to be restored at the right point without restarting from zero each time. My ideal solution is: the calling show keeps track of where it was when the nested show was launched. When exiting the nested show the calling one is restored where it left off. Maybe an optional parameter can instruct the calling show what to do after. If missing it restores itself, if present maybe can force the calling show to go to another slide, or to do something else. Anyway, if the nested show contains a "run after" command, this could be considered in precedence. If missing, the more natural (to me) behaviour of restoring the calling point should be considered. Regards. Umberto.

Mmmmh... I did not expect the Run slideshow command would have this behaviour. Say that I have a multi level menu. It starts from a main screen and let me choose a sub menu on another slide. This slide has many clickable items with run slideshow command. A the end of the launched slideshow, if I force the launch of the initial menu I'll be transported to the main screen of the menu. With the run application command I would be transported to the sub menu since the menu slideshow was still executing in background. I expected that the run slideshow would have this second behaviour. Instead I suspect that the calling slideshow is completely discarded from memory to let the launched one go on... My idea of nested slideshows is obviously bad Mmmmh I don't know... This new behaviour constraints me to operate both on menu and sub slideshows to get something working. The previous one was easier to manage. Maybe an option to activate nesting? Regards. Umberto.

Igor, Just tried b8. I know that it's work in progress, but i think it's better to say: The function Run slideshow seems to work but: the nested show has the "wait a key press to advance to next slide". This function seems not working. Slides go on automatically. Moreover, when i press ESC to exit the nested slide, also the root slide exits. Looks like the esc pressure does not work in a nested fashion, or it is interpreted twice. Obviously i recompiled all the exe with b8. Regards. Umberto

Regarding the memory addressing capacity on 32 bit systems... A 32 bit system can address only 3 Gb of RAM, not 4 Gb. Usually in a PC the fourth Gb of memory is used for the memory mapped I/O. Many PC-s bioses have an option that remap the fourth Gb of ram as the fifth, so it is not hidden by the 1 Gb window of the memory mapped I/O. But to be able to access the fifth Gb of ram you need a 64 bit system. So, if you plan to use a 32 bit system, simply purchase 3 Gb of ram. The fourth one will be unused. Regards. Umberto.

Wow. I missed the possibility to change the rotation pivot of the image. Mmmmh... next slideshow will be better Regards. Umberto

Igor, It's really exciting, can't wait for it! Wow! Thank you. Umberto

Igor, I tried beta 7 only now and nothing to say about animations. But I had some toubles with shows launched by other shows. In 5.5, to avoid strange screen flickering under Vista I built a menu in windowed mode. Once displayed on the projector it looked at fullscreen so the show went all ok. Now with b7, that was adapted to Vista OS, I tried to put the menu at real fullscreen. But I got the following trouble: when I try to launch a show from the menu, I hear the launched show audio but not the video. The menu remains on the top of all and I need to switch to the show screen with alt-tab or win-tab. I suppose that the newly launched exe should stay on top of the older one? Anymore: in 5.5 when the mouse was floating over a clickable item it becomes an hand, in b7 it does not happen and user cannot understand that the item is clickable. Regards, Umberto.

Happy birthday Igor! And thank you for all your efforts on PTE! Umberto.

Ehm... Wow. Double misunderstanding! I mean... when cloning the keyframe there is no interpolation but a simple copy of the parameters. My mind is joking Please forget. Umberto

Peter, I think you got the point. I also noticed that when cloning keyframes there is an automatic interpolation of pan/rotate/zoom values. Clearly Igor did that trying to simplify the creation of keyframes, but i always found myself changing the interpolated values because they were never what I wanted to be. Maybe someone find this feature useful. Personally I don't. Maybe a configuration flag somewhere that lets the user choose if he wants interpolation or just a simple copy of the parameters can be useful. Regards. Umberto

Igor, Finally I did some test with 5.6b6. I confirm that the mipmapping "pre computing" glitches are gone. It works well also on my machine (geeh!) I confirm you also that when Aero Glass is turned on the animation has less frames per second but it is more stable, without strange accelerations after fadings. When Aero Glass is turned off the animation is more fluid but in some points of the show there are those annoying accelerations, and that makes me think that I'll keep using PTE with Aero Glass despite the lower performance. It looks like the bad effect comes in after fading from an heavy slide (with heavy I mean 4 or 5 pictures animated with Ken Burns effects). Fading simple Ken Burns effects between single pictures does not introduce those effects. I'll try when possible to install also XP on this machine and see what changes. Regards. Umberto.

Hello Luc, I temporarily solved the "ground loop noise" trouble by plugging the headphones exit to a "ground loop noise" filter for car audio. I paid 10 Euros for this piece and it seems to work well. It has 2 RCA male connectors and 2 RCA famela connectors. Anyway, I don't know if it will work well on every audio system I will plug my laptop into. The USB interface you are speaking about... what precisely is it? An external audio card? I see that it has SPDIF output, that should eliminate the ground loop noise I suppose. After reading something on ground loop noise filters, I understood that the filtering mechanism works by breaking the line with two 1:1 micro transformers (one for each stereo channel). Does the USB interface work in the same manner or is it totally different mechanism? Thank you. Umberto

Wow Ken! I tried the codec you suggested and it is so good on respect to the DivX codec! Thanks! Umberto