Opinions on worship software.

[Nathan J]

Originally Posted by MPCC Media

It does not really matter how great your computer is, you should not be running directly off of a hard drive. I've seen reports of how even some of the best computers out there these days have issues with skipping right in the middle of service while running through any good software.
The safest way to play video is from a DVD.

I'm assuming you mean playing it through a SEPARATE DVD player, not the one on the computer and through the software. In that case, I agree -- the DVD player will be much safer than trying to play through the software, whether it's on hard drive or the internal DVD drive. That's why scalers/switchers come in very handy!

We are using a Mac with ProPresenter and while it has a really neat setup for playing and cuing DVDs, I just have a really hard time trusting it. I've just been burned too many times with such things! Playing video off the hard drive (as in backgrounds in such) is almost 100% stable, but still the safest thing you can do is use a dedicated hardware player.

[Chris3jam]

To answer the hardware question about Mediashout, I ran it on an HP Pavilion laptop, with Windows XP. I've got ATI grahics card, AMD Athlon 64 processor, 1.99 Ghz., 1.25 gig of RAM. I didn't load it on the desktop computer at church, since I work on this at home. Now, we run the powerpoints off the computer at church, and we haven't had any glitches so far, except for the video. When we play the video in the powerpoints, we still see the glitch when we start and stop the video, and it does not play smoothly. We have a separate DVD player for DVD's; however, I was trying to incorporate videos into the powerpoint presentations. Trying to time a DVD perfectly with a choir number proved to be impossible; we need the flexibility and manuverability with something like Powerpoint.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by Chris3jam

...I've got ATI grahics card...

Please note, just because you have an ATI (or nVidia) graphics card, does not mean you don't have shared video memory.

A few years ago, we started out with an ATI Radeon X300 SE and had nothing but trouble. When we upgraded to the X700 Pro, we were golden (pretty much).

[Chris3jam]

I'm fairly certain it's not shared. *think* It's a PCI bus card, an ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series, 128 meg.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Originally Posted by Chris3jam

I'm fairly certain it's not shared. *think* It's a PCI bus card, an ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series, 128 meg.

ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M for AMD Notebooks - Specifications

HyperMemory™ is innovative technology that seamlessly enables the Graphics Processing Unit to use a combination of local and shared system memory with real-time performance at a reduced consumer cost and up to 128MB of memory

So the answer is both.

[jdchitt]

At the end of the day, the main choke point in running worship software is the graphics card. The app will only perform based on the performance of the card. Some of the vendors do a great job of pushing all video playback directly to the card, utilizing the graphics card memory (like ProPresenter we use), and when they do, it's as SMOOOOOTH as you can get for playback .