Moving from MediaShout 4 to PP. Opinions?

[MaxwellsMac]

Hello all,

I've been the visual director for a fairly large church for almost a year and I'm thinking of changing our sanctuary from MediaShout 4.5 to ProPresenter 4 soon. I'm so sick of MediaShout either not playing certain video files or hanging for 30 seconds or more after playing certain other ones. This past week during VBS my frustrations finally came to a head when MediaShout froze the computer at least 5 times throughout the week. I've done all the workarounds with the quicktime alternative but still find myself having to convert many videos before they'll work. Sometimes even after converting they hang the computer. Even beyond the video issues, MS has always felt buggy to me and will sometimes crash without warning when just doing something as simple as building a new lyric from scratch. I just don't think workarounds should be a part of customer support. The software should work as intended.

I downloaded the PP demo and the interface seemed fairly intuitive. I'm waiting on approval on a new iMac but before I take the plunge I want to get some opinions from those of you on both sides of the software fence. Are any of you fellow MediaShout users as frustrated as I am? Will PP play the majority of video files thrown at it?

Thanks for any and all opinions.

[MaxwellsMac]

BTW, I should disclose that I am primarily a "Mac" guy (as my username obviously shows) which might be part of the "video problem". We use a Mac Pro to record our sermons in our control room and a MBP is my mobile work station. The guy who had my job before me was a Windows guy which is why MS is on the rest of our machines. From what I understand MS for Mac is even worse so I'm not even really considering it.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Do you have a good amount of RAM on the MS 4.5 machine? Video card? Current video card drivers?

I've solved many problems with worship software by updating the video card drivers.

Is it mostly MOV or M4V files that are giving you troubles?

[MaxwellsMac]

The "problem" machine is a core 2 duo running XP pro with 4 gigs of ram. I'm not there right now and I can't remember the video card but I know it's nothing to write home about. I had considered the weakness of the machine but considering many of these problems are also happening in our Kidstuf room and they have a brand new hot rod running Windows 7, I'm reluctant to blame the strength of the machine. Windows 7 seems to have it's own share of problems with MediaShout and codecs however. Oh, and yes, it is definitely mainly .mov and mp4's that are having the problem. I'm able to eliminate about 80% of the problems when I convert these files to avi's or wmv's however that isn't always possible especially when the Pastor sends me a video file to place in the script 10 min. before the service is going to start. (This never happens to you guys, right? lol) I guess what I'm saying, is if we're going to spend money on a new machine, I would rather bite the bullet and also spend money on the best possible solution, even if that means switching to a new piece of software. Our other 2 stations will have to remain MS for now as my volunteers there are not ready to learn something new yet..

[Esoteric]

I am a PP guy all the way. I can't imagine going back to Media Shout.

Stability, lots of what we call baubles and do dads (like the technical terms?), very easy to use, and constantly being upgraded.

Everything I look for in any software.

Mike

[petereit]

Toss the PC. Seriously. Not worth the effort.

Once you learn ProPresenter on your new iMac you'll kick yourself for not having switched sooner. We're running PP on four different Macs in our organization. It is SO refreshing to be able to spend all our time building awesome content instead of blowing the week just trying to get our tools to work.

[forty31]

We switched from Easy Worship (and Media Shout before that) on a PC to PP4 on an iMac and we'll never go back. It's exactly what Mark said...I get to spend time building content, not trying to get things to work.

[Esoteric]

By the way my PP works fine on my PC. You lose some of the add ons, but 99% of my clients don't use them anyway.

Mike

[[Admin] osborn4]

Well, I can tell you that I've had zero problems for several years with my SongShow Plus installation on Win7 and WinXP.

Evidently it's a higher learning curve (I haven't tried the others, myself), but it has a lot to offer.

Remember, these are just tools and different software works out better for different people (and evidently I'm more different than most. )

[KeckCreative]

Yeah... MS has never really played nice with MOV or M4V files. I would have originally picked PP over MS back when I was making the decision, but church was going to be Windows based and PP for Windows wasn't released yet. Next upgrade, I'll be considering PP again (but still for Windows)

However, I've used MS on XP, Vista and Windows 7 without video issues, but again I quickly learned to render everything in WMF format since MS player seems to be primarily built around Windows Media Player.

One thing that does annoy me about MS is it's inconsistent nature on playing directly from DVDs. I have yet to get it working properly/consistently on the Vista machine.

[bpalermini]

I've used MediaShout and now use PP on both Macs and PCs. The current version of PP is more stable than what I was used to with MS from a couple of years back. But, even with completely up to date PP you still need need to give it the right file formats for it to work well.

[Mustangnaz]

I've been a MS user for over 5 years now and have always loved it, it is has so many features and options which is awesome for a power-user like me. It does seem though that version 4 was released prematurely and they have been playing catchup ever since; every update seems to introduce more bugs. I have it working reliably on two computers, but the initial setup and tweaking after every update is becoming annoying. MS for Mac is dumbed down and doesn't even have native DVD and PowerPoint support. Not sure what MS is up to, but it's not looking good. At National Worship Leader Conference last week I talked to their rep who basically said they are moving towards a simpler, more user-friendly release with MS 5. Disappointing to hear for me, I'm going to be checking out PP.