Differences: miniplayer, preview, exe

[yhooth]

I just installed the PTX 5.5 trial version. I have 10 slides ranging in size from 200k to 2m with various transitions and animations and background music. This is running on XP with a 1.8G cpu, 1G mem and GF4 Ti4200 card with 64m. I realize that this is a minimal configuration. The slideshow runs smoothly and perfectly in the miniplayer - even at full screen mode - but is jerky and rarely completes using the Preview mode or the exe.

My guess is that the different modes use the hardware differently. Thoughts?

Thanks, Yaz

[Lin Evans]

Hi Yaz,

Yes, images are downsampled for the mini-player so resource loading is much less. If you haven't already done so, try downsampling all your images to 1024x768 or the nearest equivalent depending on your aspect ratio.

Remember that jpg files expand in memory to their full 8 bit size just as if they were an 8 bit tiff file. It's file dimensions which are much more important than indicated jpg memory size. A 64 meg memory card doesn't have a lot of room for mistakes in file sizing because you may have up to or greater than 60 images per second being produced when you use animations. A two meg compressed jpg file size may expand to five meg or larger in memory and if you multiply this by sixty frame per second you can see that it may greatly exceed the capability of your 64 meg card. If you downsample to a file dimension of about 1024 x 768 then the 64 meg card "may" be able to render smooth animations. If not try 800x600.

Best regards,

Lin

[yhooth]

Thanks for the info Lin. I installed version 5.6 beta 20 and the problem has disappeared. It all runs smoothly in the full screen Mini Player, Preview and exe with no changes to the images or the slideshow - other than a recompile of the exe.

Ta, Yaz