Manslide – a Fantastic Slideshow Creator for Linux

If you’re looking for a nice slideshow maker for Linux, one that supports everything from transitions to soundtracks, I would recommend giving a program called Manslide a try. I just did, and it’s fantastic!

First, Manslide is really easy to use. Except right the start. Unless you speak French.

That’s because Manslide starts off, no matter what your language settings, with all the dialogs in French. Of course, the first dialog you see is one asking you what language you’d like to use, and it’s easy enough to pick English (if that’s your language like it is mine), but that doesn’t solve everything. You’ll still be reading in French when you’re asked to pick a location on your hard drive where… something… will be put. That part is still in French, although the part warning that you must have write privileges is, at least, in English. After you’ve done that, the program quits. Simply restart it and now everything is in English, and very easy to use.

Once you’re up and running with Manslide, it’s a lot of fun. Simply create a new project, decide where to save it, then add some slides. Once you’ve added slides, you can add effects, such as transitions and some 3D effects such as fog and if you want, text may be added. You can also choose to edit an individual slide. Manslide comes with some basic positioning and rotation tools, but also provides a link to edit a particular slide in GIMP.

Once that’s all complete, you will probably want to add some type of soundtrack. This could be a narration you’ve recorded, or simply a music file off your computer. One of Manslide’s features that made this process simple is the ability to automatically match the length of the video with the length of the audio.

Up until adding the video, you’ve been telling Manslide to make each slide last for ‘x’ number of seconds, with any transisions taking ‘x’ of seconds as well. In my testing (15 slides), this would have led to a 60-second slideshow. However, the music I selected lasted 90 seconds. Sure, I could have tweaked the settings on my slides to make sure they matched, but all I ended up having to do was click the button to match the langth of the video to the length of the audio, and it was done.

Once you have everything set, you can use Manslide to watch a preview, and once you’re satisfied, to encode and export your masterpiece. At the moment, Manslide supports four different video formats: MPEG2, which can be burned to VCD/SVCD/DVD, Xvid, for viewing on your computer or on the Internet, DV (digital video), which can be entered into almost any video-editing program, or FLV (Flash Video), if you want to upload your slideshow to YouTube, for instance. You also have control, at this point, over the quality of your eventual slideshow. This is one area I’d like a bit more control, as the options aren’t really telling me anything specific (the options, I believe, were average, good and best).

Once you’ve selected your parameters, go ahead and click to begin the encoding process. Depending on the number of slides you’ve chosen, and how intricate any extra options, such as transitions or effects, this could take a while. Once you’re done, you’ll get a notice and then an offer to view your slideshow. If you’re completely done, you can simply quit Manslide, but if you’ll want to come back and work on it later, simply save the project and you can return to it at any time.

And that’s it! I realy enjoyed my first experience with Manslide. I’ve worked with slideshow appliations on the Mac before, and they were incredibly easy, had many of the same features, and worked the way I expected, right from the start. Manslide, aside from the language issues at the beginning, was the same. This Linux application was as easy to use as a Mac application, and coming from someone with a Mac background, that’s about the biggest compliment I can give a program. If you’d like to check it out yourself, head to the Manslide Sourceforge page, or head to any of the software websites, such as KDE-apps.org or QT-apps.org or Freshmeat, and download a copy for yourself. You won’t be sorry!