Hi, I'm not sure what you are trying to do in your code, but there is 1 glaring error right from the start.

# This photo is larger than the 1024x800 app size
my $big_image = SDLx::Sprite->new( image => '/path/to/photo.jpg' );

my $lil_image = SDL::GFX::Rotozoom::surface( $big_image, 0, 0.7, 
                           SMOOTHING_ON );
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If you read perldoc SDL::GFX::Rotozoom you will see that SDL::GFX::Rotozoom::surface requires a surface as input, NOT a SDLx::Sprite as you do in your code.

From the perldoc:

 my $picture = SDL::Video::load_BMP('test.bmp');
 my $rotated = SDL::GFX::Rotozoom::surface( $picture, 45, .8,
                                                         SMOOTHING_ON 
+);
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Furthermore, from looking thru the SDL perldocs, it seems you can only load BMP files at this time. Have a look at the example script at /examples/GFX/script_roto.pl in the SDL module distribution.

Upon further investigation, it looks like you can load a jpg into an SDL::Surface with SDL::Image

 use SDL::Image;
 SDL::Image::init(IMG_INIT_JPG); #loads JPG support
 SDL::Image::load("file.png"); #loads PNG support
 SDL::Image::quit(); #unloads everything
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