So, I'm thinking of building my church a new PC for their slide show stuff for their big screens at the front. Their current computer is old. I mean OLD. Like "can't get out of it's own way" old. Seriously, this PC projects the words for the music and slides and sometimes plays videos (in very low quality) and it glitches when transitioning from one slide to another with very basic effects. When it plays video? It's embarrassing. It's that old. Currently, there is no transition effect from one slide to another because the PC can't handle it.

Anyway, I was wondering if Linux could be used for this job and do it in professional quality. The PC basically needs to:

- run two different screens (the projectors and then the "background" desktop on the monitor in the booth)
- do slideshows with animated backgrounds, nice transition effects flawlessly and with very good video quality.
- play video (I know Linux can do this one :) )
- play audio in very good 2-channel quality.

That's pretty much it. Not too much demand on it. My concern is the slideshow stuff. Not sure if Open Office is advanced enough to do the higher quality transition effects or animated backgrounds.

Thanks in advance!

IIRC, MythTV does some nice OpenGL transitions, and you can have music playing at the same time. Don't think I've tried it with XBMC.

Hey, Myth! How's it going in you're world? Stuff's going much better over here. Wife's doing better and we bought an HD-Ready 42" CRT RPTV from CL for a hundred bucks. Needed an IC convergance board and still needs a CRT coolant change (coolant is ordered) but once I do that and perform a full manual convergance, I'll have a full HD picture that rivals today's flat panels for only $200 total invested. Plus, this tube has a DVI input. Looks like I need to get into ripping Blue Ray now. ;)


Hmm...so you're suggesting that instead of using separate programs for slideshows, music, and video, using one media center program like Myth to do it all.

Currently, they run Windows and use PowerPoint for the slideshow (song lyrics and slides), and Media Player for the videos and music. The Music Minister creates the Power Point slides and the video guy/gal in the booth edits them for the screens so I'd think it would have to be Power Point compatible or at least be something that could be easy to transfer over.

Also, what about a program that will play animated backgrounds behind the song lyrics but still give the video guy/gal control over when the slides change? Like the song lyrics change when the video guy/gal gives the command (clicks 'next') but there is a looping video background playing behind the words.

Hey, shane, going just fine. Glad to hear that your wife is better. :)

Yeah, I don't know about playing video with the lyrics superimposed. That's an interesting challenge. Maybe there's some karaoke software somewhere that can do it??

Dunno.

When I was at my previous church (a mega-church with more money than Bill Gates) they did that a lot in the contemporary service. The lyrics would change via a basic fade in/out effect but the back ground would be a looping video of some type like scrolling landscape that looked like a film out of a car window from the 70's. It's really neat looking.

Not sure what software the church used for that but I'm sure it wasn't Linux based.

They prolly had a mac.

You can get the same effect in linux by using some video editing software to layer in the lyrics on a video. Of course, it won't be dynamic, but if the music's there, too, it won't need to be.

You got a point there that I didn't think of. Mac's are known for being able to do stuff like that.

I wonder if there's something that will do that in Winduhs. I certainly wanted to run *Nix over Winduhs, but perhaps Winduhs might be better suited here. And Mac's are out of the question seeing as my tithe is 600 a month and a Mac is 2 grand. 600 would build a darn nice PC.

To be honest with you, I don't even know of any Windows programs that would do that. Maybe you can ask in one of the Windows forums.

Macs are expensive, I know, but I've seen them pull off some pretty crazy stuff. When I was in Los Angeles, I was working on a stage crew once for a professional musician, and he had like a 40-foot display. It took cranes to put it together, and the "pixels" were individual LED's. It was driven by a mac and the video effects were quite stunning.

Like I said, though, you can just pre-edit the song video super-imposing the lyrics with transitional effects in linux, and then play it back in linux, as well. And you can certainly drive a couple of projectors with the right xorg.conf.

And if you just want to duplicate their current PowerPoint/MediaPlayer setup with Linux, you can use OpenOffice.org Impress and whatever media player you prefer.

Well, the PC would rarely play music. They do every once in a while, but rarely. The music is done via live band/choir and the words are up on the screen for everyone else to sing along.

Currently they use Powerpoint and slides in power point with a still background to display the words. The slides are set up with no time limit. In other words, the user must tell Powerpoint to go to the next slide. It won't do it automatically. Wonder if later versions of Powerpoint support animated backgrounds instead of just still pictures, colors, or gradiants.

I'll have to do some research here. Might have to run Winduhs. *Nix just has many advantages over Winduhs in terms of longevity, viruses, degredation and all that (not to mention the free part. ;) ).

A quick browse of my OO.org installation on Ubuntu 9.04 shows me that it can automatically change slides and supports multiple displays. OO can open MS Powerpoint files so everything should transition nicely.

Go get yourself an Ubuntu LiveCD (http://releases.ubuntu.com/jaunty/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso) and try it out on a computer you have with one of the existing PowerPoint files.

Well, currently, I don't have any of the powerpoint stuff with animated backgrounds (if it is indeed powerpoint to begin with). That was my old church that did that and I thought it was kewl as heck!

I'd love to run Linux for many reasons over Winduhs which is why I'm asking if linux can be professional grade when it comes to presentation type stuff.

I am confident that OO can do the current powerpoint stuff my church runs with ease. The stuff they do now is very basic which is why I'm wondering if it can be "snazzed up."

Thanks for the reply, man!

.... Wonder if later versions of Powerpoint support animated backgrounds instead of just still pictures, colors, or gradiants....

I don't use Powerpoint enough to know if that's possible. However, you could just make a bunch of mpg files and setup a playlist in whichever media player you like best (totem, mplayer, vlc, etc, etc).

I'm not sure what the best way to sync them to the live performance would be. Maybe just design them to be 20 or 30 seconds too long and manually advance to the next file at the right time.

Yea, that was mentioned above. In theory, it would work if the music went without interruption or changes. Sometimes, the worship leader will pause and speak in between stansas of music or he'll do an additional chorus or go back and repeat an earlier part of the song. That's why the words have to be dynamic and controlled by the video guy/gal so they can jump to the right slides with the right words on the fly.

Good suggestion nevertheless! :)

On the windows side, my old church used to use a really nice program. I'll try to dig up what it was called.

Not to butt in, but... :)

My old church used to use EasyWorship with Windows, did everything you would ever want. My new church uses MediaShout... Looks like it does pretty much the same thing, but I like EasyWorship better (preference).

All in all, these programs "run the show" for you much better than other software I have seen attempting to do the same.

Not to butt in, but... :)

My old church used to use EasyWorship with Windows, did everything you would ever want. My new church uses MediaShout... Looks like it does pretty much the same thing, but I like EasyWorship better (preference).

All in all, these programs "run the show" for you much better than other software I have seen attempting to do the same.

Thanks, man!

I met with my Pastor yesterday and he is excited about the idea of a new PC. Just to make things easier on the church (especially since I won't be the main user of the PC) I will just run with a VERY stripped down version of Vista as the OS so they can run the current programs that they're used to.

Thanks for the replies and for taking the time everyone!

Just out of obscure curiosity, and because I stumbled upon this today (I love that button :D ) and didn't know it existed, I wonder if this might have a tool/program that would do what the church would require:

http://ubuntustudio.org/

The website doesn't go too far into what this distro includes as packages.

Ubuntu Studio is mostly aimed at authoring a CDs/DVDs so it has various audio and video editors.

From what little I've read it's for the content creation side of things not the live performance side.

Gotcha. Thanks!

thanks a lot shane I have been lurking for over 2 years and your post finally got me to register :D

I am the worship director for a smaller sized church (less than 500) and I originally looked very hard into a possible move to a linux/open source platform, but it was just not possible for us.

The biggest reason was powerpoint, i know that OO can run powerpoint slides, but the sermon and other slideshows that we did were quite complex and Open Office would always mess up some detail it could never seem to convert correctly.

Most of the other small to medium sized churches around where I live use a windows based solution. Often mediashout as it allows for the much loved text over video. but there are many other windows solutions, we use dreambeam (free and Open Source) and it's pretty open so you can really get in and modify the code you suit your needs (with a little work it also allows for text over video) but alas we can never seem to get away from PowerPoint

We will soon be going to a dedicated Power Point machine, a dedicated video machine and a dedicated lyrics machine with a video mixer to combine and switch between. this is really the ideal setup.

Well, welcome to the forum, linuxrunner! LOL

I think my church runs Mediashout IIRC. Like you said about OO, that was one of my concerns about running that instead of PowerPoint.

Looks like it'll be a Windows-based PC which saddens me but whatever it takes to make it work. I wonder if there is a video-switcher program that can be used. Probably not. Since this PC is my tithe to the church, funds are obviously limited so I can't do 3 dedicated machines and a switcher. This PC will be one beast of a computer that would make some of the most avid gamers proud so at least they won't have to upgrade for a good long time. I think the PC they're using is a *gasp* single-core Celeron! No wonder they can't do any effects!

Thanks for your input, Linuxrunner! Stick around the forums! Lot of great people here.

The biggest reason was powerpoint, i know that OO can run powerpoint slides, but the sermon and other slideshows that we did were quite complex and Open Office would always mess up some detail it could never seem to convert correctly.
.

Why not *create* the slideshow in OpenOffice Impress and save as .odp, rather than importing .ppt files? Is there some functionality from the authoring standpoint that Impress can't do that you need? I suspect there isn't, you just need to try.

If someone else is creating the slideshows for you, it costs them nothing to download Oo and try the latest, even on their Windows machine...

^^^ And I think there's been a lot of improvements to Impress's compatibility in OOo 3.x.

So it might be worth another try if the last time they tried was with OOo 2.x.

Why not start with installing the Windows version of OO 3 and see how the presentations look? Then you'll have some basis for deciding which platform to adopt for the longer run.

Not a bad idea! It IS free after all. ;)

I do the song lyrics at my church, and I must say from experience, one program may not be enough. If you're looking for something to do announcement slides or perhaps sermon slides then something simple like OO will work well (We're a mac shop, so we use Keynote for this). For music though we use LiveWorship.
The key to LiveWorship (and some of the similar music oriented programs) is how they use two screens. One screen is your live output to the projector and the other is a song/slide selector and editor. The slide list should be able to show a minimum of, say, 6 slides and allow you to randomly display any by clicking on it. This is very handy when the worship leader skips a verse. Since you can see the next several slides, you can usually catch up with the music without anyone really noticing. Try doing that in keynote... it can be done, but it's a pain. Keynote only shows you the current and next slides, and skipping around has to be done with either keyboard shortcuts or insanely small thumbnails.
On the down side, LiveWorship is pretty clunky for anything other than music and some of the editing and formatting options for the slides are limited (e.g. no vertical margin adjustment in the version we have).
If you could get the OO interface to behave like LiveWorship, then I think you may have a reasonable solution.

Found out that our church uses EasyWorship 2007 (sorry, got the name wrong before) for their stuff. I know nothing about it.

It was mentioned earlier in the thread to have 2 or 3 PCs and switch between them with a sort of video mixer type thing. Does anyone know where I can get more info on them? An HD video mixer would be ideal that can accept inputs from PCs (VGA or DVI), a camera and other analog sources, and also output multiple channels if possible.

I googled "video mixer" and came up with some articles on equipment that's 20,000 dollars or more or DJ sound mixers. Google FTL.

If you don't get any other leads, then you should track down the phone number for the Leo Laporte Technology Radio show and call in and ask him what he uses for a mixer. He multicasts the show and has mentioned a couple of times what he uses and it sounded like it was a "prosumer" product rather than a "professional" product. But I didn't commit it to memory since I'm not buying one.

If you don't get any other leads, then you should track down the phone number for the Leo Laporte Technology Radio show and call in and ask him what he uses for a mixer. He multicasts the show and has mentioned a couple of times what he uses and it sounded like it was a "prosumer" product rather than a "professional" product. But I didn't commit it to memory since I'm not buying one.

I believe he uses a Tricaster, iirc.

http://www.newtek.com/tricaster/

Just curious, but why would you want to mix the video? Easy Worship can do everything you need to run in a Church with a newer PC. ie. not as old as your old one... :)

It was a recomendation by another member earlier in the thread. He recommended 2 or 3 PC's running into a video mixer.

After going to the EasyWorship site, I believe you are right and I spoke with the worship leader at my church and he's going to look into upgrading the versin of EasyWorship. The new PC I've chosen will easily be enough to handle anything EasyWorship can do (it's a Core i7 2.87GHz with a GeForce 9600GT with 1GB DDR3 video ram and 8GB DDR3 regular ram...overkill?...yes, but might as well future-proof them a bit), so we're going to go that route instead of an external mixer. The current PC can't handle video through EasyWorship. It crashes when they try.

Side question: anyone know of a good video switcher (not mixer...more of a multiplexer but in reverse)? The church has 4 projectors (two on screens at the front (the main projectors) and two projecting on the back wall) and some hallway TVs. The front projectors display the slides, music, sermon notes, and all that, the rear projectors display some slides, and also display the output from a small camera (so the choir can watch the baptisms which happen above and behind them), and the hallway TVs display just the slides, sermon notes, etc. Currently, the rear projectors are connected via coax which give the worst picture quality imaginable. I want to connect them with either component (which is how the front projectors are) or VGA and also be able to make the TVs in the hallway show video from the camera. The hallway TVs are also connected via coax but they are regular tube TVs so quality isn't as important out there. Is there such a thing as a multi-input, multi output multiplexer?

Haven't played with it much, but have you tried Lyricue? It's a Linux-specific worship presentation program, similar to EasyWorship (I guess - haven't used that, either). It looks like it might meet your criteria (transitions, text-over-video, etc.). It's GPL, so it's free in every sense of the word. Can't beat that! Check out www. lyricue. org

Another option if you want to use Linux *might* be SundayPlus running on Wine. It's an old program that they've been trying to update for the last 5 years, but the company has had some problems. At any rate, the program does run on Wine with Linux. You have to install an older version of Quicktime (6.5) and MS Powerpoint viewer 97 or 2003 (not 2008), plus use Winetricks to install Riched20/30, plus you need to be running something other than Metacity as a window manager (like Compiz) so that the SundayPlus window doesn't stay permanently on top of other windows (including its quit confirmation dialog). Biggest problem is, the computer has to be pretty darned fast to run it smoothly, because it's running on an emulator, basically, so that makes it slower than on native Windows. It also can only view media that can be played in Quicktime or Powerpoint Viewer. Also a bit pricey. But it works pretty well if you meet all those conditions, and has a stellar, dead-simple GUI. See www. sundayplus. com

Or, if people are just used to Powerpoint anyway, you could simply use OpenOffice.org Impress, and get the GL transition add-on for some really slick effects, if you have a full GL-capable graphics card.

Hope this helps you!

Sorry about the URL's being odd. Wouldn't let me post them in their usable form.

Thanks for the reply, Mike!

I spoke with my worship leader and he wants to stick with EasyWorship. They're going to upgrade it from the 2007 to the 2009 though. I've got the PC built and it's running Vista Business (which I'm going to strip down even further). I'd rather run linux, but I think it'd be pretty difficult to convince the higher ups in the church, especially since they don't know much about computers.

I'd rather run linux, but I think it'd be pretty difficult to convince the higher ups in the church, especially since they don't know much about computers.

Just tell them Microsoft is an evil, unethical company that shouldn't be supported financially by a church!

Convicing them of that would be difficult. Trust me. These are older small-town folk who don't know much about computers. Like this:

"So, what kind of computer is that?"
"Dell."
"Cool. What kind of processor does it have?"
"Windows."
"No, the processor. The chip that does all the thinking."
"Oh, uh... Internet Explorer."
*smacks face*

I don't think explaining to them that Microsoft is a company that has systematically used unethical and even illegal business practices to keep a monopoly position has anything to do with IT knowledge (or is beyond their grasp). Anyone would understand that bullying and blackmailing your customers and similar behaviour is unacceptable.

Anyway I digress, it's your church and your decision to make.

I get what you're saying, Tux, and I do not disagree. The hard part wouldn't be convincing them that Microsoft's business practices are unethical, the hard part would be educating them on Linux and the GPL. To them, all computers have Windows on them because they simply don't know any different.

But I appreciate the thoughts, Tux. :)

How about something like this to split the video from the PC and other sources:

http://www.kvm-switches-online.com/0vs22014.html

I like the idea that it uses Cat5 which is very cheap and easy to run. This system also transmitts audio and is easily expandable. I would run a video switcher or multiplexer before the base transmitter unit so that I could switch between sources (PC/Camera). My only concern is the TV's in the foyer. Currently, they display the same signal that the large projectors at the front of the church display which is usually a powerpoint-based slideshow for sermon notes. What I want, though, is for the TV's in the hallway to display video from the camera so the Pastor can be seen and maybe show the sermon notes in a PiP or something like that. Not sure how to implement that though.

A lot of churches use ProPresenter (Mac) or MediaShout (PC). I've never seen a Linux equivalent.