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Ahh, the software section. While I was able to modify the hardware in 2-3 hours, I spent days on the software.

It seems, that the laptop was not able to boot all kinds of bootable CD's.
While it was able to boot most "complete" OS, it would not boot the small-specialized Linuxes.
My assumption is, that they all used Floppy emulation on the boot CD and that that was the problem.

Oh well, I finally got tired of this, ripped out the HDD and put it into my Sony Vaio (I had to dig quite deep into the poor Vaio). I installed photo-ix while the drive was in the Vaio. It worked perfectly.
I put the drive back into the Toshiba, just to realize that it would detect the display as 640x480. Oh crap.
Long story short, I tried Womp next, just to find out it would not work correctly when I compiled the images myself from the developer package (I had to try this, since Womp usually requires user interaction and I wanted the movies pictures to start automatically).

After a week of disappointment and long nights I finally arrived at my salvation:
Damn Small Linux
A Knoppix based mini distribution with a light window manager, and it installed on my box.
During boot I gave it the parameter: fb1024x768
so it would know my displays resolution.
I then performed an HDD install (as described on their website).
It went smooth.
Next find the video and image player software.
I am not going into too much depth on the image viewers, since you can find similar projects here:
Picture Frame Projects
The main problem was hiding the mouse during playback.

So on to the video player and the scripts.
Inspired by womp I first tried Mplayer. Well again to make it short, the DSL (Damn Small Linux) Version of Mplayer would not start from the command line and there is no Debian Package. Compiling the sources requires the installation of g++ and libraries ...
Then I remembered, that VLC is my favorite player anyways and it is available for nearly every operating system. So I opened a shell as root (su root) and did a quick "apt-get install vlc".

For some reason, the packages for DSL are older than Methuselah. The version I got was a 0.2.2.something.
Whatever, lets press on, I am getting tired of this.
Figuring out how this version of VLC can be called from the command line and play movies in a loop was a bi**h. The --longhelp gave me only vlc:loop which made no sence and was ignored by VLC. --loop was not available in my ancient version of VLC.
So I am going to save you half a day by telling you:
"vlc --fullscreen movie.mpg movie.mpg vlc:loop &" is what's in my script (plus sending all messages to /dev/null).
If you call it like this:
"vlc --fullscreen movie.mpg vlc:loop &"
it will not loop the movie.mpg file. For some reason it needs at least two to start from the beginning again. The file would now loop indefinitely. Well now you know why it took me half a day to figure it out, it is not mentioned anywhere online.
I have set up my DSL to boot automatically into X-Windows (single user setup and no password).

All that was left to do was to put the script that calls the video into my .xinitrc (and remove that dillo line that calls the help).
Rebooting and voila, the video starts automatically (see the last section of this project to see an mpeg of the frame in action).

So now I have two scripts (one that calls the video and one that calls the photo slideshow).

Thanks to Andre Doehn, who helped me set up SSH and a few other things. I now can upload pictures and videos through my Windows machine and swap the two scripts. The picture frame has a wireless card connected to it.

Everything was working right, until I noticed I forgot to disable the feature in the bios that disables the screen when the laptop is not used. Good thing I was still able to hook up a keyboard: