Worship Him Vs Mediashout Vs Easy Worship

[Gene]

Originally Posted by JLR

Now the only problem arises is things like today. Pastor obtained permission from Fox news to show clips of two Israel related news stories, however they had to be played from the website... so back to the smooth (Ha Ha) in and out using the projectors still command and mute! It worked but I do fear if we can actually put stuff into a schedule that we may all forget how to do it the hard way! Oh yeah I almost forgot Fear NOT! JLRAIOSFWM9000 would even be able to handle this type of situation, Honest!

MediaShout isn't perfect, but it would actually handle this I think. It has a full-screen web browser built in, where the controls stay on the control screen. You'd still get all the Fox news cruft around it, but you could fairly seamlessly show it without doing the projector mambo.

[Cubeman]

We got MS v3 and have had a problem with the video playing smoothly, as it does from a DVD player, or as it does through Windows Media Player. The machine exceeds the company's recommendations, yet the problem persists despite lots of time spent with their tech people, and following their recommendations. So if you plan to use MS v3 for text-over-video, or just for playing video of whatever type, scrutinize this feature carefully before you buy!

the above post references an issue that we found with media shout as well...it has hung up on us a couple times during video playback, so we moved to PVP for video playback. We may just need to refresh the machine and make sure there's nothing competing with it. There are enough people that don't have the issue that makes me think it's something competing on the computer.

So far, in the pretty intensive kids area, Easy Worship has been playing back mpg 2 files and slides just fine... And their tech support was super helpful getting a new computer to cross fade between videos. It turns out Nero was installed and installed a codec automatically that didn't play well with cross dissolves...one of their techs pointed me toward another codec pack and it worked. All within 10 minutes on a Saturday via support forum. That said something to me.

We're going to keep testing Easy Worship to make sure it does what we want and may give it a shot in the big room for lyrics and slides.

Sean
http://www.harborsidechurch.org

[Cubeman]

Sean, thanks. This machine was purpose-built and has no other software of this type on it. Shortly, I will be looking at the machine with your input in mind... but also I'm amazed when everyone talks about these small video files... we are playing high-quaility video clips on the IMAG that are anywhere from 30 to 80 mb in size, which are on the computer's hard drive, and have absolutely no problem with them when played in WMP. Nor do we have any problem w/ DVDs played on the machine's DVD player app which came w/ the Plextor drive. So it seems to point to MSv3 but I've been around this stuff long enough to know that often things are not what they seem. So though I suspect MSv3, I cannot uniquivocally state that it is at fault. One thing's for sure... when I find the problem, I will broadcast it loud and clear to the CM.net family! Our church is large, I'm a full-time media person, and our journies through high tech have yeilded interesting results on a number of fronts!

[larepublican]

This has been a great thread - our church is also in the market for new software (trying to get away from PPT) and this has given me a lot to think about.

[cheneye1]

We went with ew because for the price we got a site license and we didn't have to pay for every upgrade. Which we love media shout for its beefiness. And our youth and children ministries within our church uses Media Shout. There was one drawback in the begining with Easy Worship which has cause us a glitch was video we would get sometimes we would get an overflow stack error and crash the computer during service. This was solved when we got a beefier computer. The only other thing you need to consider is the building of the song database. Which takes a long time to build unless your can get a jumpstart from another church who uses the same book that you use.

[DaveJ]

Cheneye1
Easy Worship allows for downloading songs from Song Select (CCLI) which allow for creating song data base. I have downloaded many songs this way. Also note that Easy Worship will have a new version 2007 coming soon.

[ABHin]

we dont use EW because it does not support Chinese, and it has problem with video feed...so we use MS 3.2 now, in Hong Kong.

But we found it clashing with our video capture card too, lol, maybe it's the problem of our card.

[QueenBee]

I did some research couple years ago too, back then I tried Shout Media, Sunday Show Plus and Easy Worship. And I find Easy Worship is user friendly and meets all the needs that I wanted.
If you want something simple yet versatile, Easy Worship is the way to go. I had to train several vounteers to operate the computer, and with Easy Worship it just takes no more than 30 minutes.
Technical Support is prompt and these guys are very knowledgeble and good from what I read on their forums. I personally did not have any problems with their software. I am well pleased with it.

[hamguy1956]

Don't forget the equipment you are going to use at home to set up service and put the songs in on. I was going to use SSP until I thought about what the other volunteers have for computers at home. If I had gone that route everyone would have had to buy a new computer to work on. For our church and volunteer group we are going with Easy Worship, it uses the current crop of computers our volunteers have without any upgrades, you can make up the service schedule and bring everything into the projection computer and that builds the song data base up there. It also is a bit easier for some of the volunteers to learn.

Just my thoughts! I have been reviewing a lot of projection software in the last couple of months and have come back to these two for us. When we can get everyone's home computer updated or another laptop that will work we will go with SSP until then it will be EW.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by hamguy1956

Don't forget the equipment you are going to use at home to set up service and put the songs in on. I was going to use SSP until I thought about what the other volunteers have for computers at home. If I had gone that route everyone would have had to buy a new computer to work on. For our church and volunteer group we are going with Easy Worship, it uses the current crop of computers our volunteers have without any upgrades, you can make up the service schedule and bring everything into the projection computer and that builds the song data base up there. It also is a bit easier for some of the volunteers to learn.

Just my thoughts! I have been reviewing a lot of projection software in the last couple of months and have come back to these two for us. When we can get everyone's home computer updated or another laptop that will work we will go with SSP until then it will be EW.

SSP has a workstation mode, it's the same as the full one but with a watermark, for 3 months I used SSP on a celeron 900 with 128mb ram to make our programs up.

That's all your doing, not projecting, besides, if they are not the fastest, SSP will disable High End Features so that it's still operational, it will give you enough to build shows and slideshows.

[Jeffrey Denton]

We use media shout and use all of the extras it packs to tweak the best we can be at our job. How ever it depends on your congregation. Some people are distracted by all the extras used in a real media production. If you are in a conventional service use a cheaper easer program to keep it simple. If you are in a high media environment service go for all the bells.