Sony memory stick slide projectors.
A friend of mine got access to a Sony projector. One of the things that was interesting is that it has a memory stick slot on it, and it can project directly from the memory stick. Turns out that you have to process the presentation to make it work though, and Sony provides such software. For Microsoft Windows + Microsoft Office. We'll have to see about that!
I've never used the Sony software, but a friend was kind enough to provide some sample files. Konqi and the JPEG kfile-plugin showed that it turns the files into 1024x768 baseline encoded JPEGs. KHexEdit showed that there is a master file for each presentation that includes the number of slides, the filename of the title slides (which are added) and the filename of each of the JPEG encoded slides.
A quick trip into KDevelop (which really needs a template for "gimme a plain old command line application, with KDE support") produced a junkcode viewer for the file format, despite not being able to get KRun to work.
A subsequent visit to KDevelop produced a partial writer, and I'm currently procrastinating rather than finishing it off. Maybe over the weekend, since I'm going to the linux.conf.au 2005 organisers meeting tomorrow night.
The long term goal is to integrate this functionality into KPresenter, as "Export to Sony Memory Stick...". Shouldn't be hard - modify the HTML export wizard, save to JPEG instead of PNG, and write out the SPP master file.
There are a few subtleties, including handling the case where there are already a couple of presentations on the memory stick, and you want to add another one. Also the master file is fixed length at 16384 bytes, and I'd like to know what happens when you have 249 slides, since the 249'th filename won't fit into the 16384 byte file.
I do have a couple of issues that I'd appreciate some help on:
- Is there a reasonably portable way to find out where the memory stick is mounted? If so, I'd like to use that as the default location to save to. Parsing /etc/fstab isn't going to make it....
- Is there a KDE/Qt equivalent to mtools? I'd prefer to be able to save to the memory stick even if it isn't mounted.
- Is the cleanest way to create an arbitrary binary file to use a qt:QByteArray and then just stream the whole thing out? Or to write bits of it at a time?