Wii Fun Wrap Up - Part 3 - Javascript/Ajax Slideshow Software

I started this activity by returning to google and doing a number of searches for javascript slideshows, javascript image gallary, ajax slideshow and finally ajax image gallary.

There were several sites that came back with 20 to 30 different options. Most were oriented towards displaying a gallery of images on a traditional website and were more complex than what I was looking for.

After much searching and reading I settled on the ones listed below and set them up to test from the Wii.

1. Highslide
2. Lightview
3. Google
4. Floatbox
5. dojo.image.SlideShow
6. Slideshow2
7. Simple Controls Gallery

Generally my experiences were not as favorable as I had hoped. Several of the routines didn't work while others had some quirk that made them less than optimal.

One of the more unfortunate problems I ran into was that the Wii would issue a sound confirmation when it finished loading images. This along with the blue status bar was distracting.

Highslide

Available from: http://highslide.com/.

This software worked but the controls were awkward.

Lightview

Available from: http://www.nickstakenburg.com/projects/lightview/

I wasn't able to get this software to work on the Wii. The first time a series of images are loaded they don't display right. The next time they do.

Google

Available from: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/helloworld.html

This software worked but requires that images be on a server that is publicly accessible to the Internet. As I was looking for an easy way to pull photographs from my own internal server this wasn't going to work for me.

Floatbox

Available from: http://randomous.com/floatbox/home

I wasn't able to get this software to work on the Wii.

Dojo

Available from: http://www.dojotoolkit.org/

The dojo routine worked as long as you used v1.1.1. The Dojo library doesn't appear to work on the Wii's Opera Browser for any version of Dojo after v1.1.1. This caused some problems as the dojo.image.SlideShow in v1.1.1 didn't work quite right. This was fixed by taking the slideshow widget from a later verison of Dojo and running it with an earlier version of the library. Not something I would recommend but it worked. Also, the transitions were not smooth.

Slideshow2

Available at http://www.electricprism.com/aeron/slideshow/

This software is built on Mootools v1.2. I wasn't able to get this software to work on the Wii.

Simple Controls Gallery

Available at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/simplegallery.htm

This software appears to work but I didn't spend too much time with it.

After testing these applications I moved on to see what I could do from a flash perspective.

Wii Fun Wrap Up - Part 2 - Package Solutions

Based on my decision to pursue web based media servers I narrowed my Google search criteria and came up with the following candidates:

Wii Media Center X

Written in java by Red Kawa available at http://www.redkawa.com/mediacenters/wiimediacenterx/.

This software is free but is listed as Alpha or Early Alpha and has not been actively developed since Dec 2007.

Orb

A service available at www.orb.com which consists of software that you load on your PC which then sends the pictures, music or video to servers at orb which then stream it back to your Wii.

Makes use of the Flash 7 player in Opera on the Wii.

Tversity

Available from http://tversity.com/. This software allows you to stream pictures, music, videos and Internet content from a PC to your Wii.

An interesting note is that tversity is built from open source but is not open source itself. It is free to home users with an option to upgrade to a Pro version.

Makes use of the Flash 7 player built into the Opera browser on the Wii.

X-oom

X-oom Media Center for the Wii software costs $40 and is available at http://www.x-oom.com/usa/index.html. It looks to allow access to the following media files: MP3, WMA, OGG, DivX®, Xvid, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, JPG, BMP etc.

Wiideo Center

This project hosted at SourceForge was updated as recently as Dec 2008. It is located at http://wiideocenter.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. The software uses mencoder from the mplayer project to encode source media as flash and then download to the Wii utilizing the Opera Flash 7 player.

WiiCR

This project is also hosted at SourceForge but hasn't been updated since Feb 2007 and there has been no activity since Dec 2007.

This is by no means a complete list but rather the software I looked more closely at. Where they existed I looked at the feature sets, looked over the screenshots and read what documentation existing. I even installed it Tversity.

I didn't find any significant endorsements for any of the solutions. The one that looked the most interesting was the orb solution but I didn't really want deal with my content being hosted through someone else's server. In the end I decided to move on.

My next step was to look and see what existed in the way of javascrip/ajax slideshow components that would meet my requirements.