Have you ever thought about turning your digital photos to screensaver of your computer?

Compared with normal screensaver, a slideshow-mode screensaver displays in various motions ways: Radar, Mosaic, Fade and more. You can set the display order, the interval between photos, the duration of photos and the number of photos displayed in the screensaver.

Many slideshow software support outputting your slideshow in screensaver format, such as Proshow. There are also some screensaver makers like Photo Slideshow Screensaver creates screensaver in slideshow style in more professional way.

Photo Slideshow Screensaver helps you point to the location of the photos folder and make the slideshow as the screensaver. After you install the program, there will be an option called Photo-Slideshow added in the ScreenSaver option of Windows. You can select the photo you want and set the duration and the transition effects and then make the screensaver. The program uses hardware acceleration when performing effects which will work fast even on slow computers.

You can try the program absolutely FREE!

Before making the decision to purchase a DVD slideshow software, many people may concern an issue:” will my finished DVD be protected from being copied by others?” Unfortunately, almost none of slideshow software on the market provides copy protection like the Hollywood DVD. However, it does not mean you can’t protect DVD you make.

Hollywood DVD’s are protected by a technology called Content Scrambling System (CSS), which restricts playback of the disc on authorized devices. There are those who don’t respect the copyrights, so you want to make your photo DVD movie like the Hollywood DVD to prevent others duplicating the disc? Unluckily, you may not. At least, you can’t do this currently, since the necessary CSS license is prohibitively expensive for most consumers.

By using CSS technology, the content of the disc is encrypted and the DVD player must have a decryption key to play the DVD. The manufacturers of DVD players has licensed from the DVD CCA (DVD Copy Control Association). However, the CSS encryption technology is based on a rather weak scheme and was broken in 1999. While still illegal, it is not difficult to find software that bypass the encryption and extracts the original video from a DVD.

Two other methods are also sued on Hollywood DVDs in order to restrict the use of the disc: region encoding and Macrovision. Region encoding is like TV system. It is divided into region 1 and region 2, similar to PAL and NTSC for TV system. Region 1 DVD can only be viewed in North America and Region 2 DVD is for Europe. Macrovision can prevent DVD videos from being copied on a VCR. Both CSS and Macrovision have been circumvented.

Photo DVD Maker Pro supports creating both region 1 and region 2 DVD, but not supports CSS technology. Actually, no consumer DVD authoring software support CSS encryption so far.

Does this mean you can’t protect your own work from being stolen? Not exactly, you may add some copyright notice and watermark to stop the photos being used by unauthorized people.

According to Wikipedia, Slideshow is a modern concatenation of "Slide Show". A slideshow is a display of a series of chosen images, which is done for artistic or instructional purposes. Slideshows are conducted by a presenter using an apparatus, such as a carousel slide projector, an overhead projector or in more recent years, a computer running presentation software.

You can make use of a slideshow to deliver a wonderful business presentation or to create a photo slideshow which would be a more vividly memory of your great moments, such as your wedding, commencement and some fantastic parties and gatherings, moreover, by using our Photo DVD Maker Pro, you can enjoy your amazing slideshow on your TV with creative transition effects and background music.

Slideshows have the ability to move people in ways that simply aren’t possible with pictures alone. With slideshow software, the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words means you can speak volumes without saying a syllable.

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If you want to save more bandwidth on your website, you may need to make wise choice when you consider what image format use on the website. Normally, the image format is divided into two parts, compressed and uncompressed. Obviously, you may use compressed on the web.

On the web today there are three main image format types to choose from and all have their advantages and disadvantages.

GIF

The CompuServe GIF is commonly used to upload documents to the CompuServe Information Service and to pass documents between other types of computers. The idea behind designing GIF files was to create the smallest possible image file for uploading and downloading from electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), thus producing a highly compressed format that minimizes file transfer time over phone lines. Most communication programs (for BBSs and the InterNet) allow the user to download GIF files and view them as they are downloaded. Another advantage to GIF files is transparency. A color within the color table can be selected as the transparent color. In doing so, wherever that color occurs, you’ll be able to see through to the HTML background. One of the largest downfalls to the GIF format is its inability to have a color palette of more than 256 colors. This can create poor looking images when used on a photograph which may originally have thousands of different colors.

JPEG

JPEG is a lossy compression graphic format since its compression economizes on the way data is stored and also identifies and discards extra data, that is, information beyond what the human eye can see. However, in most cases, the difference between the original and compressed version of the image is indistinguishable.

In trying to decrease the file size of the JPEG (for example, when using the quality slider in Photoshop), you'll tend to notice artifacts occur in flat color areas and especially near edges. As a result, JPEG is best used for images that have more of a variation in colors. For example, images with gradients or photographs can handle a lower quality setting with little noticeable loss in quality. Images with text or large solid backgrounds are best left for GIF or gif.

GIF

gif is an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. gif is similar to GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency.

gif supports 8. gif supports alpha transparency, whereas GIF only supports one-color transparency. The big attraction to gifs is its ability to do alpha transparency. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer currently doesn't have full support for it, although there are hacks out there that can pull it off. gif and GIF are also very similar in that they both work better with large lines of the same pattern or color. If you do not need alpha transparency but wish to use a color palette greater than 256 colors then you are looking at a 24-bit gif. It'll be important to test between a 24-bit gif and JPEG to see which achieves better results. gif still suffers the same problem as GIF in that they cannot optimize photographs as well as JPEG can.

Is there a winner?

No format is best in all scenarios. Therefore, it's always best to play around with the various formats and compression levels to achieve the best results.

DVD is the abbreviation of Digital Video Disc. DVD R/RW is commonly used format, which HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD are becoming popular.

Each kind of DVD has their own strongpoint compared with other kinds of DVD.

• DVD+R/RW
  
DVD+R is the recordable format and can be recorded only once. Once the data are written on it, they are permanent and you can’t write other data any more.
DVD+RW is the rewritable DVD format and you can use the disc to burn repeatedly by erasing the existing data.
• DVD-R/RW
  

DVD-R is similar to DVD+R and cannot be rewritten.
DVD-RW is similar to DVD+RW. The data on DVD-RW can be erased numerous times.

• DVD-R DL and DVD+R DL
  

DL means Dual Layer. The standard DVD can hold 4,7GB files and actually 4.37 GB in maximum, but Dual Layer DVD can hold 9.95GB (DVD 9) or 15.9GB (DVD 18) data. However, only a few of slideshow makers support burning Dual Layer disc.

• HD DVD
  

HD DVD stands for High Definition Digital Video Disc and it is a digital optical media format which is being developed as one standard for high-definition DVD. HD DVD is divided into R and RW disc as well. Both single layer and dual layer are available. The main difference between DVD and HD DVD is the different video solution they support. Videos on standard DVD is 720 by 576/480, while on HD DVD it is 1920x1080 or 1280x720. HD DVD is promoted by Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and, most recently, Microsoft, HP, and Intel.

• Blu-ray DVD
  

It is quite similar to HD DVD, but has more information capacity per layer, 25 instead of 15 gigabytes, but may initially be more expensive to produce