This evening I successfully burned two DVDs for the 40th Anniversary of the Mint Hill Historical Society, which is coming up on Saturday. For several years now I’ve been volunteering with the MHHS, helping with oral history interviews and their website. For Saturday’s event, they want to play a silent slideshow of 1087 photos on a projector, and also play a series of videos on a large format television. While it’s certainly possible to play those videos from computers, I’ve found it’s less technically challenging and more user-friendly to just play videos like this from a DVD player. In this post I’ll briefly share my workflow for creating both these DVDs.
Video Slideshow
The MHHS staff provided me with 1087 photos on a USB thumb drive for the video slideshow. With a 3 second display time, the duration of the final slideshow video is just over 1 hour and 12 minutes.
To create the slideshow I used the Photos app in MacOS. I imported all the photos and put them in an album, but I needed to randomize them. Amazingly, there does not appear to be a simple way to do this. I found an AppleScript for Automator (which I’ve used a few times in the past) which did a little shuffling, but I found it didn’t randomize them enough. So, as I often do today, I turned to ChatGPT (ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, specifically) and it provided an AppleScript which worked great:
on run {input, parameters}
with timeout of 1200 seconds
tell application "Photos"
activate
set imageSel to (get selection)
if imageSel is {} then
error "Please select one or more photos."
end if
set photoCount to count of imageSel
-- Build a list of indices {1, 2, 3, ...}
set indexList to {}
repeat with i from 1 to photoCount
set end of indexList to i
end repeat
set seqNum to 1
repeat while (count of indexList) > 0
set r to random number from 1 to (count of indexList)
set idx to item r of indexList
set im to item idx of imageSel
set newTitle to my padNumber(seqNum, 4)
set name of im to newTitle
set seqNum to seqNum + 1
set indexList to my removeItemAt(indexList, r)
end repeat
end tell
end timeout
return input
end run
on padNumber(n, width)
set nStr to n as string
repeat while (length of nStr) < width
set nStr to "0" & nStr
end repeat
return nStr
end padNumber
on removeItemAt(aList, idx)
set newList to {}
set listCount to count of aList
repeat with i from 1 to listCount
if i is not idx then
set end of newList to item i of aList
end if
end repeat
return newList
end removeItemAt
With the photos in the album sufficiently randomized, I exported a slideshow video from the Photos app. That took awhile, and the final video file was almost 6 GB in size. I used Handbrake software (free) to compress the video to a little less than 1 GB in size, and provided the video to staff both via Google Drive and also uploaded it to the MHHS YouTube channel. That way if anyone needs / wants to play the slideshow directly from the web, they can do it via YouTube.
I also uploaded all the photos to the MHHS Flickr Channel, and put them all in an album. It’s possible to play a slideshow from that album’s webpage, but I don’t know of a way to randomize that playback directly.
Burning the DVD version of the slideshow video proved to be the most challenging, mainly because I needed to locate my blank DVD+R discs in our garage, and I also had to find the correct USB adapter for the old DVD player/burner I still have connected to a 2012 27″ iMac in my office. (I don’t use it anymore, but it’s a great dust collector… and does come in handy for moments like these!)
Again I asked ChatGPT for advice, and it recommended I use the open source software program Burn. The program converted my MP4 video into the requisite MPEG-2 video format, and speedily burned the video into DVD disc format. Yay!
I created the thumbnail for this YouTube video using Canva.com, which is now my favorite software platform to use with my students in both my web design and media literacy classes.
Combined Video Montage
I also burned a combined video to another DVD for them which features some YouTube videos from their channel, as well as a segment from a PBS video special that just aired about a month ago and includes a segment I’m in discussing Mint Hill history. These three videos are:
- Welcome to Mint Hill – 1964
- Step Into History at MHHS
- Boom Towns: Small Towns On The Rise | Trail of History (Mint Hill segment starts at 20:56)
To make a single video file from these three videos, I first downloaded the first two from YouTube (directly from the MHHS channel’s admin console in YouTube Studio) and used Tubly Downloader to download the other one. I used QuickTime Player for MacOS to “trim” the third video (the segment we want to play is just 6 minutes long, and the end of the original) and then used QuickTime Player to combine the three clips into a single MP4 video file. The interface has changed a little over the years, but I made a video tutorial of these basic steps 12 years ago using QuickTime Pro 7. Apple no longer has a “QuickTime Pro” version, the software is now just “QuickTime Player,” but it still supports quick edit videos like this. It’s a workflow I use often and love!
One other cool thing I discovered in the course of creating these DVDs was the AI-powered music website Stocktune.com. Initially I created a version of the slideshow video with copyright-friendly music, and I wanted to find some North Carolina folk music / Appalachian style music. I found 4 tracks I liked, and linked them in description of the (now unlisted) musical version of the 40th anniversary slideshow. This is a website I’ll likely use again, and will (eventually) add to the “resources” page of Storychasers.org.
Over the years I’ve created a variety of DVDs for different projects and purposes, and shared blog posts about those techniques and experiences. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have access to blank DVDs, a DVD burner, and a DVD player, but I’m not planning on giving up any of these resources anytime soon!
Yay for DVD authoring capabilities!
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