Also, something that makes Windows Media Player a tiny bit less useless in a world of VLC and Media Player Classic.
How to make a Suicide Girls screensaver using Windows Media Player.
Also I just thought about how this could have gotten me fired at EA for having done something very similar.. so disclaimer don't try this at work OR on a network with a Windows Home Group that looks for content on connected machines.
While bug testing I was generating several bug videos a day and had set up my windows media player to share content. Apparently the video screens downstairs were set up to play all shared videos.. so all my bugs were coming up.. and probably any miscellaneous gametrailers from other studios. It was worth a laugh when they finally hunted me down...
So yeah..
For simplicity sake use Excel. in the first 3 fields type in xx. 01 and .xx
For the following lines pull down so you have a list like
I ran it up to 100 but there aren't that many sets that have 100 pictures.
Select the fields with data and open a notepad document to copy them into.
I'm sure there's an easier way to build the list but this is pretty quick and painless.
Press ctrl+H in the notepad to open a find and replace dialogue. type in or cop the xx. and the tab and replace it with xx. then replace all. Repeat for .xx
Your objective is to create a list like
Open an image in the Suicide Girls website. From what I remember and my test just now it is best that you're logged in so you can get a url that will open to an image.
Once you've copied the url link to an image and you know how many images there are in a set, open Windows Media Player and open the image URL in Windows Media Player.
Save the single image to a playlist.
Find and open the playlist.
Copy your xx.##.xx list up the the amount of images in the picture set.
Example:
I added the original URL as file one, because that's how it should look when you already saved the playlist starting with it.
You can then Find and Replace the xx. and .xx with the parts before and after the image number to create the full list of images.
I couldn't remember if you needed to stay logged in for the playlist to pull the rest of the image you haven't cached yet, but that was the point of the exercise when I thought this up years again, and regardless it did work and still does.
The hitch is that many images are in portrait.. but if you have a monitor that can swivel it is actually pretty cool to split the playlist into landscape and portrait images.
Pity it still doesn't work for creating a rolling desktop though.. oh well.
And it works pretty well as an alternative to HTML previewing and Flash previewing of new sets because if you have one of these playlists already created.. you can clone it, and find and replace the image url for one from a new set. if the amount of pictures isn't too different editing that is also painless.
I said that displaying the portrait images would be annoying but it appears one good thing about them is putting wmp up in portrait view on the left side of the screen and letting it run the playlist leaves the other half of the screen for whatever else you are doing. Nifty.
Plus no simpler thing that mousing the wmplayer window to see what number the player is at.
Hmmm.. maybe filling the playlist with all the recent sets I've missed (haven't been on the site in a few months, would help me catch up.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows/downloads/personalize/wallpaper-desktop-background
I'd like to think that windows 8 addresses this kind of thing.. but it probably won't.