# Screensaver Hack Problem



## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

When the K3 first came out I picked one up and one of the first things I did was the screensaver hack.  It worked like a charm.  Recently a friend of mine picked up a K3 and asked me to install the screensaver hack in her Kindle.  I followed the exact same process and everything seemed to go well except for one peculiar thing.  I loaded 5 pictures into the screensaver folder on her K3.  They are all greyscale, 600 x 800, similar resolution and file size, etc.  The K3 only displays two of the 5.  The other 3 never show up.

Any ideas what I did wrong?


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Have you restarted the Kindle since loading the latest image files?


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

NogDog said:


> Have you restarted the Kindle since loading the latest image files?


Several times. I loaded all 5 images at the same time. Only two of them are ever displayed. I can't figure out why the other three don't show up.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

I don't know of any reason for sure, but my suspicions would be either something corrupted in the missing images, or else something about the way they are named (e.g. some special characters in the file names that perhaps Windows is cool with but Linux -- the Kindle OS -- is not). Also, are they all the same file types? (I know JPEG and PNG images work, and I'm pretty sure GIF will, too -- at least non-animated GIFs.)


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

NogDog said:


> I don't know of any reason for sure, but my suspicions would be either something corrupted in the missing images, or else something about the way they are named (e.g. some special characters in the file names that perhaps Windows is cool with but Linux -- the Kindle OS -- is not). Also, are they all the same file types? (I know JPEG and PNG images work, and I'm pretty sure GIF will, too -- at least non-animated GIFs.)


When this first happened I thought perhaps the file names might be an issue so I renamed everything. They are all PNG images. The two that display are named RedRock.png and fence.png. The three that won't work are named boat.png, cowboys.png and 2yearold.png.

I'm going to uninstall the hack and reinstall it and see if that makes a difference. Then I'll load the images files in one at a time and save the two that work for the very last.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Sounds as if you're at least as smart about it as I am.  Probably trying each one individually is a good idea, in order to find out if just one of them is corrupt (or at least unreadable by the Kindle) and perhaps causing it to go back to the first one when it can't load one of them? Or maybe hope that NiLuJe wanders by here at some point with a suggestion on how to debug it.


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## laurie_lu (May 10, 2010)

I'm watching this thread closely.  I want to apply this hack to my brand new K3 but am a bit afraid.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

laurie_lu said:


> I'm watching this thread closely. I want to apply this hack to my brand new K3 but am a bit afraid.


I've been running it on my K3 since last autumn with no such problems, for whatever that's worth. I think I recall hearing of someone else with a similar problem and believe it was determined to be due to a corrupt image file, but in general I've not seen this -- and note that even this problem is just certain screensaver images not being displayed: no other functional problem with the Kindle.


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

laurie_lu said:


> I'm watching this thread closely. I want to apply this hack to my brand new K3 but am a bit afraid.


Please don't hesitate to give it a try. I've done my Kindle and several others and had no problems at all. And this particular one isn't that big a deal. So she can only see 2 of the 5 images. I'm suspecting that one of those two is the culprit and as soon as I get my hands on her Kindle again I'm hoping to fix it.


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## NiLuJe (Jun 23, 2010)

Yep, that sounds like a weird format/corruption quirk. You might want to check if they display correctly using the builtin (somewhat hidden/buggy) image viewer (Hint: put them in a zip archive in a pictures folder on your Kindle).


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## NapCat (retired) (Jan 17, 2011)

DCScott said:


> I'm going to uninstall the hack and reinstall it and see if that makes a difference. Then I'll load the images files in one at a time and save the two that work for the very last.


I would be inclined to remove the images and try new ones, rather than remove the hack (which may be a problem after the last software upgrade). I installed the hack prior to the upgrade and it survived. I add/change images every couple of weeks.

Good Luck and let us know how it goes...


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

My friend came over but forgot to bring her Kindle so I decided to experiment on my K3.  The three images that don't want to load on her K3 don't seem to want to load on mine either so that pretty much points to bad image files.  I have no idea what is wrong with them however.  They view fine in Gimp, Photoshop, Elements, etc.  They are all 600 x 800 pixels, 75 pixels to the inch, grey scale, png files.  Just for kicks I converted them from png to jpg but that had no effect.  Not sure where to go from here as she had her heart set in these particular photos.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

That's weird. If all else fails, maybe display the image and then use a screen-capture utility to create a fresh image file?


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## NapCat (retired) (Jan 17, 2011)

NogDog said:


> That's weird. If all else fails, maybe display the image and then use a screen-capture utility to create a fresh image file?


Strange...if all else fails and the above does not work, you can always physically print the images and rescan them for new files ??
Keep working on this.......I'm involved now ! ha !


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

This just got truly weird.  I brought one of the images up on my computer screen, grabbed a screen capture with Snagit, saved it as a png file, checked it's resolution with Gimp (600x800) and loaded it into my K3.  It still won't display.  I'm beginning to take this personally because I'm in all three of the photos that won't load on the K3.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

DCScott said:


> This just got truly weird. I brought one of the images up on my computer screen, grabbed a screen capture with Snagit, saved it as a png file, checked it's resolution with Gimp (600x800) and loaded it into my K3. It still won't display. I'm beginning to take this personally because I'm in all three of the photos that won't load on the K3.


This truly made me "LOL". I wish I had some clever idea as to what's going on. If it's some sort of bug that is reacting to a specific pattern of pixels (your face?  ), maybe something like scaling it up a bit and then cropping back to 600x800 (so you'd lose some pixels from each edge) might help, or perhaps fiddling with contrast/brightness a bit? Or do a left/right flip of the image? Burn some incense and sacrifice a chicken?

Any chance you'd want to share any of the images so we can try?


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

I've put the three images in a file here if anyone wants to go play with them. I've run out of ideas.

http://my.pogoplug.com/share/I9l1VhhknG9a_q8WCZofRA/


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

DCScott said:


> I've put the three images in a file here if anyone wants to go play with them. I've run out of ideas.
> 
> http://my.pogoplug.com/share/I9l1VhhknG9a_q8WCZofRA/


I tried the boat.png file on my K3, and it worked fine.


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## NapCat (retired) (Jan 17, 2011)

I only see two images...."two year old" and "boat"; both worked fine on my K3.

Curiouser and Curiouser.....


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

It must be the missing image: even that web site won't display it.


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## DCScott (Sep 1, 2010)

I ran out of time and never got the third image on the server.  I just tried once again to load the boat picture on my K3 and it still won't come up as a screensaver.  I even deleted 2 of the 4 screensavers I have had for some time so that I only had a total of 3 loaded.  I am baffled as to why you guys can load/view them and I can't get the same files to work on either my K3 or my friends.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

It's sort of sounding like a bug in the Kindle itself, except I think you said you tried it on two different Kindles, didn't you?   Do you know if they're running the same firmware version and hack version? Did you try the uninstall and reinstall of the hack yet -- maybe making sure you have the latest version of it before doing the reinstall? (I'm just brain-storming here, since I don't have the know-how/tools to actually get in there and debug it.)


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