Last Minute and Multiple Bowstrings

You know the old saying "if it weren't for the last minute nothing would ever get done."? That is pretty much the guiding philosophy of my life. Unfortunately that sometimes runs up against technical difficulties - that's when it is good to be able to work around things - having two strings to your bow in a manner of speaking.

Last Sunday we were planning to do a promo for the Operation Christmas Child boxes. The plan was to play one of their promo clips from the DVD they send out in the information packet. Unfortunately, I put it off until Saturday afternoon, just before worship practice, to try to make it work.

MediaShout is supposed to handle DVDs pretty well, so I shoved it in and grabbed the clip I wanted... Not good. The video would play but there was no audio. Mind you, this is the first time I've tried to play a DVD through MediaShout, so I had to check all the settings and see if I had missed something obvious (I've spent half a day trying to fix the audio on my laptop without realizing that I had left the headphones plugged in, so no sound from the speakers). After an hour of messing around I started trying alternate approaches. First thought was to see if Windows Media Player would play it - yep. No problem there. Well, sort of a problem. I can't get Media Player to send the output to the projector. In the process of trying to make that work I manage to mess up the dual display settings to where the projector is now the main display and the screen is the secondary - and I can't seem to get MediaShout to think differently. That ate up another hour. By now the worship team is assembling and I had to put the slide show together, so I just dropped the whole video thing until after practice.

Sometimes it is smart to just drop back and punt. On a random shot I tried grabbing the raw file off the DVD and renaming it to mp4(2?) and inserting that. Hey! Presto! It all works great now! I'm sure I read about the mp4 thing on CMN somewhere. It was sure good to have that spare bowstring on hand.

Today I did a bit more research and decided the problem was that I needed to update the codecs. Did that and it does DVDs just fine, although there is an occasional hesitation that I attribute to a rather minimal video card and not exactly first-line computer.

Good to have it going. Good to have a random bit of knowledge that gave me a work-around when I needed it in a hurry. Not so good to try to do it at the last minute!

Pastor Tim