After many attempts, to make this reliable, I thought I should share how our small Museum runs scheduled slide shows that start just before opening hours and stop just after opening hours. This adds to the reliability of them working, but also saves electricity, a big factor when the displays are running on old donated TV’s. The TV’s are scheduled with hardware digital timers, we use Tapo, but others are available. We use old donated laptops, running Windows, ideally with SSD’s, and the laptop means short power cuts do not disrupt the show.
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Build the presentation in the latest version of LibreOffice and add the Impress Runner extension. Using Slide Transition, set the slides to advance after the needed number of seconds. Under Slide Show settings, set to Loop and Repeat. Load the Impress Runner extension and set to autostart, by selecting the Impress Runner icon, top left in Impress. Save.
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Using either NotePad or NotePad++ create two .bat files, (Text files with a .bat extension, easy to save in Notepad++) , one called Start, the other called Stop. Change C:\Users\Desktop\Slides.odp to reflect the path to your slide show in both places.
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Start .bat file content. The -norestore is important to avoid a query needing user input next time, when Stop terminates the program.
@echo off
set LIBREOFFICE_PATH=“C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\soffice.exe”
set PRESENTATION_PATH=“C:\Users\Desktop\Slides.odp”
REM Start Impress with no recovery and auto-show
%LIBREOFFICE_PATH% -norestore “C:\Users\Desktop\Slides.odp”
- Stop .bat file content. Probably only needs soffice.bin but added .exe just in case, and does no harm.
@echo off
echo Stopping LibreOffice…
taskkill /F /IM soffice.bin >nul 2>&1
taskkill /F /IM soffice.exe >nul 2>&1
echo LibreOffice has been stopped.
Then in Windows Search box, start the built in Windows Task Scheduler. Go to Action > Create Basic Task , give it a name, select Weekly, and set the start time, (After the Monitor hardware start if using a timer on the Monitor) and days of the week, under Action, select start a program, and browse to your start.bat file.
Repeat the process for the stop.bat program.
Test thoroughly ! You should be able to manually test the .bat files just by double clicking to test they start and stop Impress, then test the scheduling.
Hope this is useful.