Easy Slide Show Creator 1.30 - User Guide and FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions - Easy Slide Show Creator

1. Can I view a slide show on my TV or DVD player?
   Not at this time. Slide shows created with ESSC are only playable on a Windows PC or Apple Macintosh.
   
   
2. My slide show plays choppy and the sound stutters, why?
   First, check the system specs, Pentium II class 200 MHz processor and 32 MB of RAM are the base requirements. ESSC scales pictures to fit to screen by default, so your pictures may be larger than you realize. If a picture is very large (like 1600x1200), displaying them will take longer and can affect music playback because of their increased file size. Also, pictures that are meant for display on a computer monitor, like those that you would want to use with ESSC, should never have a higher DPI than 72, as this is all that a monitor can display visually. If your pictures were imported at a higher DPI, such as those used for printing, the file sizes will be much larger. You can remedy this by resizing the pictures or reducing the overall quality in a program like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Please note that pictures downloaded directly from a digital camera or scanner are typically very high quality with a very high resolution. If these pictures are not altered once they are downloaded from these devices, they will typically be very large and require a lot of resources to display (true for any program, not just ESSC). If the 'Fade' option is enabled, try turning it off to increase performance. If the slide show is only choppy when played from CD-Rom, this would indicate that the computer cannot read and process from the CD-Rom fast enough, which is either a system problem, or a CD-Rom drive problem and is beyond the control of ESSC.
   
   
3. I put a slide show on CD and now it doesn't play anything, why?
   In order to make a slide show portable and playable on anything besides the computer it was created on, you must use either the "Prepare slide show for CD-ROM" feature or the "Zip slide show" feature, both of which can be found in the File menu. If you just put your "myshow.sld" file on a CD or send it by way of email, it won't work. A slide show is comprised of many files, not just that one. Using these 2 features from the File menu allow you to put everything you need for a slide show into one folder. That folder can then either be compressed into a zip file and emailed, or the contents of the folder can be burned to CD to create an auto run slide show. When you put the contents of a "prepared slide show folder" on a CD, it's important to preserve the directory structure that was created. For example, you should see 3 files and 7 folders on your CD image.
   
   
4. My slide show plays fine on my hard drive, but once I burn to CD, I have problems, like the music doesn't play, why?
   This would indicate a problem with the CD burning software and not ESSC. Some older CD burning software requires your files to have short names. 8 characters followed by a "." followed by a 3 character file extension. CD burning software sometimes ignores files with longer names. If you find that some of your pictures or music files are not on the CD once it's burned, check the length of their names and if they are longer than 8 dot 3, try renaming them to be 8 dot 3. Some CD burning software will make this an option, so sometimes you can just enable long file names and not have to rename your files. Check the help section of the manual or documentation that came with your CD burning software.
   
   
5. After I zip and unzip a slide show, I get a script error or a Director Player error, why?
   This is most likely a problem with either yours or your friend's email provider. If your zip file is large enough to be larger than the maximum size for file attachments for your email provider or your friend's, then your attachment could be getting blocked, or abbreviated. If it's getting abbreviated, it will most likely appear as a corrupted zip file once your friend receives it and it won't be usable. To solve this, you may need to reduce the overall size of your slide show to meet requirements by your email provider or talk to your or your friend's email provider about getting these limitations raised or removed. This can also be avoided by using the CD-Rom feature instead.
   
   
6. My slide show worked yesterday and now it doesn't work today. It just says it can't find the pictures and the slide show is all black when I play it, why?
   The pictures may have been renamed or moved or they are unavailable. For example, if you used pictures that are on a CD or a network drive and now either the CD is not in the drive, or the network drive is not connected, you'll have this problem because ESSC can't get to the pictures. You can solve this by copying the pictures to our hard drive and then re-creating your slide show.
   
   
7. I can't get my midi files to work, why?
   Midi is not a supported file type, so ESSC will not be able to play a midi file. There are 3rd party programs available, some for free, that you can use to convert your midi file into something else such as a wav or mp3.