This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts
for publication in the IEEE CCNC 2010 proceedings
Automated document conversion system for simple
multimedia platforms
R. P. Martínez-Álvarez, S. Costas-Rodríguez
Gradiant
Vigo, Spain
{rmartinez, scostas}@gradiant.org
Abstract—Sharing documents across different platforms is highly
necessary nowadays. However, many devices, as embedded ones,
cannot deal with formats like PDF or PowerPoint, despite their
widespread use. In this paper we propose an automated format
conversion system to allow the visualization of formats that are
not supported in simple multimedia embedded devices.
Format conversion, multimedia, embedded devices.
I. INTRODUCTION
Some documents we handle in everyday life can only be
viewed in advanced electronic devices such as desktop
computers or laptops. This is the case of PDF documents or
slideshows. In some scenarios, the possibility of playing those
contents on a set-top-box or any other screen-enabled
embedded device would be of great interest.
We present an automated conversion system from PDF and
PowerPoint to portable graphics, to allow the visualization of
those commonly used formats on simple embedded multimedia
devices like video players, digital photo frames or IP set-top
boxes. These devices usually include a plain image viewer or a
very limited web browser. Our conversion system is also of
interest for institutional and educational IP TV environments
with centralized multimedia servers.
Regarding the final image format, JPEG is suitable when
the original document includes true color images or
photographs. However, we recommend PNG when possible,
since it does not incur compression losses.
There exist other tools, mainly desktop applications, to
convert PDF and PPT files to images [1-3,7-9]. But they have
not been conceived as part of an automated framework, and
they not follow a submit-and-forget remote server-based
approach. We do not impose any computational requirements
for document conversion or playback at the client side.
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
Our document conversion system is a Linux-based tool that
is part of a video on-demand educational platform. To upload a
document to the system there is a PHP web script that performs
the following operations:
1. Presents a template to enter all the document-
related info
978-1-4244-5176-0/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
F. J. González-Castaño, F. Gil-Castiñeira
Departamento de Enxeñería Telemática
Universidade de Vigo
Vigo, Spain
{javier, xil}@det.uvigo.es
2. Uploads the file and the metadata to the server
3. Performs all necessary tasks to convert the
document to the desired format
4. Carries out database updating to allow users to
access the document in the output format
A. PDF conversion
We use the ImageMagick tool [4]. The -density parameter
defines the resolution at which the document is rendered, with
a default value of 72 dpi (100%). At this density, a typical A4
page maps to a 595×842 pixel image.
Note that -density is not equivalent to a simple bitmap
rescaling (-geometry), since it exploits the vector properties of
PDF documents.
Although 72 dpi may be enough for some documents, in
other cases a higher resolution must be chosen, for instance if
the document includes tiny fonts that would be otherwise
illegible. The resulting image usually exceeds screen
dimensions, and scrolling is necessary. This is irrelevant, since
the orientation of PDF pages is usually vertical.
We automatically obtain an image for every page in the
document. For example, the ImageMagick command line
convert -density 144 foundations.pdf foun-%d.png
generates images foun-0.png, foun-1.png... To extract a
single specific page from the document, it is possible to run
convert -density 144 foundations.pdf [0] cover.png.
B. PowerPoint conversion
For this MS Office proprietary format we need a reliable
free rendering tool, which should be adequate for an automated
framework. A specially designed OpenOffice [5] macro
performs image conversion from PPT and PPS documents.
Since the process that invokes the macro is a PHP server
daemon, it is necessary to create a virtual video buffer before
launching OpenOffice. A bash script deals with this
intermediate step and then calls OpenOffice with proper
arguments. The basic script is the following:
#!/bin/sh
pid=`ps -eaf | grep Xvfb | grep :20`
if [ ! $pid ]; then
xauth add :20 . `/usr/bin/mcookie` > dev/null
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE CCNC 2010 proceedings

Xvfb :20 -screen 0 640x480x24 &

sleep 5
fi
Next, the users can click on the ‘play’ button to start
/usr/bin/ooffice -invisible -norestore -display :20 viewing the document, as just another multimedia content. The
"macro:///Standard.Module1.SplitSlides($1,$2)" arrow keys on the STB remote control allow to navigate and
scroll across the different pages/slides (Fig. 3).
For example, the following command line generates a JPG
file for every slide in the presentation:
./splitslides.sh profits.pps jpg

The OO macro (SplitSlides) opens the original document

and exports every page in it to the required format by means of
a filter. It requires two parameters: document path+name and
image output type.
C. Demonstration layout
For the tests, as visualization device, we used an Amino
AmiNET110 IPTV set-top box [6], with an ANT Fresco web
browser. The process to add special contents to our
multimedia platform is quite simple. The first step is document
upload. Fig. 1 shows a screenshot of the HTML template we
fill.

Figure 3. Playing the converted document on the STB screen

III. CONCLUSIONS
We present an automated conversion system to adapt
document formats to simple embedded devices. Unlike
previous approaches, it does not impose any requirements for
content conversion or playback at the client side. As future
improvements, we plan to support new special formats, such
as Macromedia Flash. Another interesting feature would be
inserting delays between slides, and even exporting some
audiovisual effects to enrich slideshows.

Figure 1. HTML input template REFERENCES

[1] PDF-Convert Inc, http://www.pdf-convert.com
Once the document is in the server, the conversion [2] Universal Document Converter, http://www.print-driver.com
procedure takes place. In a few seconds, the output can be [3] Word Pdf Convert - PowerPoint/PPT to Image Jpg/Jpeg Bmp Tiff Png
accessed from the STB user interface, as shown in Fig. 2. Converter, http://www.word-pdf-convert.com
[4] ImageMagick, http://www.imagemagick.org
[5] OpenOffice, http://www.openoffice.org
[6] Amino, http://www.aminocom.com
[7] PPT To Video Scout, http://www.bytescout.com/ppttovideoscout.html
[8] PPTmovie, http://pptmovie.uptodown.com/en/
[9] Moyea PPT to DVD Burner, http://www.dvd-ppt-slideshow.com

Figure 2. The converted output is available at the STB interface