How to play an arbitrary image slideshow?
#1
Question 
I'm writing an app for an android table called OpenWindow, I'll put info about the project at the bottom of this post for anyone interested, but my question comes first.

Is there a way for a remote app to activate a slideshow on XBMC that displays specific images held remotely, rather than showing all images in one directory?

Using calls to the JSON methods Playlist.Create, Playlist.Add and XBMC.Play, I can create arbitrary Audio and Video playlists of media from various locations, but this odesn't work for images. I've tried passing a virtual playlist to XBMC.StartSlideshow and I've tried adding images to a Video playlist.

One approach is to have my app generate a .pls playlist file, dump it somewhere the XBMC machine can access it and then call StartSlideShow (JSON or EventClient) with a URL to the playlist, but this seems quite cumbersome.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

About the app:
The app stores a database of urls to media held remotely and genre information about that media. In the app the user sets their genre preferences with a few tick boxes then presses one of four buttons (Music, Images, Videos, LiveStreams). The app then sends a playlist that suits your preferences to XBMC. It will be free and open source.

About OpenWindow:
Patients undergoing bone marrow transplants have no immune system and therefore reside in an isolation wing of their hospital for about two months. Human contact is minimal. Currently patients have only a tv for company most of the time, as anything (and anyone) entering the area must be controlled and sterilized. This app will allow patients to view media remotely managed by their family and commissioned artists, and is simple enough to be operated without any technical knowledge or concentration. A previous version has been running in a hospital for some years and has proven to improve the experience of isolation for the patient, reducing recovery time.

I will gift the app to the XBMC community when it's finished (late April hopefully).

Thanks for any help,

Andrew Martin.
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#2
For anyone interested in this, the solution I used was to create a php webservice that - when accessed with suitable query params - creates a .pls file in a location accessible by the XBMC machine and returns a URL to that file, which can then be passed into the 'slideshow' built-in function.
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How to play an arbitrary image slideshow?0