Slideshow timing on different PCs (also music looping issue)

[mattyo1]

Hi, I just made a slideshow .EXE with XnView 1.97.5 . I tweaked the transition timing carefully (1.57 sec) to make sure the pictures ended when the MP3 song ended. After getting it perfect on my PC, I copied the .EXE to my wife's laptop, and on that machine, the music ended before the pictures, and then started playing again from the beginning.

First of all, I'd created the slideshow with "Audio Loop" UNchecked, so I think the music starting over again should not happen in any case.

But my main question is, why is the timing different on different machines? Is there a way to make it the same on all PCs? For reference, here are the specs of the 2 machines I ran the slideshow on:

My desktop: Windows XP - AMD Phenom II X4 3.0 GHz (slideshow had pefect timing)
Wife's laptop: Windows Vista - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz (pictures seemed to fall behind music, causing music to run out too soon)

Do the different CPUs or operating systems affect XnView's timing algorithms? Any other ideas on this? Maybe a workaround? Thanks!

And, as always, XnView is the best!!!!

Thanks,
-Matt

[xnview]

It's strange, i use timer of the system. Do you use transition between image?

[mattyo1]

Yes, I'm using Cross-fading. Do you think her slow laptop graphics card might be rendering the fades slower than my gaming PC, thus making all the pictures take longer to display on her machine? I'll try a version with no transitions to see if that makes a difference.

FWIW, I made a slideshow of the same photos & MP3 using Ir******w (with no transitions, as that program doesn't offer any) and a similar thing happened.... the pictures took an extra 7 seconds on her PC, so the MP3 ran out too soon.

Maybe a Vista oddity of some sort?

[xnview]

Yes, I'm using Cross-fading. Do you think her slow laptop graphics card might be rendering the fades slower than my gaming PC, thus making all the pictures take longer to display on her machine? I'll try a version with no transitions to see if that makes a difference.

Perhaps it's the fading, if you try with no transition, do you have always the problem?

[mattyo1]

Hi, I was the original poster of the issue. Just to follow up... the transitions did not seem to be the cause. I never figured out exactly what was causing this, but my best guess is that it seemed to be related to the speed of hard-disk access on which the slide show was playing. On some systems, something might delay or slow loading of a picture, and thus the synchronization with the music would be disrupted. It would vary a bit between runs on the same PC even. Perhaps some kind of in-memory pre-buffering of the pictures could help?

[Mische]

I tried to find an answer to my question, but unsuccessfully. There is a similar question here, so I decided to continue with this thread.
Is it possible to set somewhere that when the exe-slideshow finishes, the background music fades out? Sometimes my friends asked me if it was really end of the slideshow or the slideshow crashed, because the music was stopped unexpectedly.
If this option is not available, how to count the transition time for the slides to synchronize end of slideshow and end of the background music when I use e.g. Cross-fading effect between slides? I tried to count it: <music_in_sec>/<num_of_photos> , but it did not fit the expectations.

[xnview]

Is it possible to set somewhere that when the exe-slideshow finishes, the background music fades out?

No sorry...

[helmut]

Is it possible to set somewhere that when the exe-slideshow finishes, the background music fades out?

No sorry...

Fading out music at the end of the slideshow would be a good feature/option, though.