MediaShout vs. ProPresenter
Posted by | Posted in Church, Tech | Posted on 04-05-2009
Let me start by saying that I don’t use Media Shout every week. I used to, but now we have several other people that create our MS content and run the show on Sunday mornings. However, this past week I had to use MS for a special presentation. This meant that I had to start from scratch and build my own script. Let’s see…how can I sum up my experience with Media Shout? Well, to put it bluntly…IT SUCKED! Why you ask?
- It will not playback mp4 files natively. You have to use a third party codec pack and even then it is not reliable. Because of this I had to play my beautiful mp4 files in QT Player, not very elegant, but it didn’t crash the machine every time like MS did.
- Doesn’t recognize the correct video dimensions. If I create a cue with an mp4 file (did this before I realized that it wouldn’t work) MS sees the video as being larger than it is and uses the wrong aspect ratio, I have to go in and manually create the correct dimensions for each video!
- Too many clicks. In MS it takes way too many clicks to do anything. For example, I wanted to play a video from an in point to an out point and have it dissolve in and out. To do this, I had to create a 1 sec black cue that dissolved and continued to the next cue automatically and place those cues before and after the video cue. Why can’t the video just dissolve in?
- The interface is clunky. We are using MS 3.5.??. We have not and probably will not upgrade to 4.0. The interface of 3.5 is clunky and confusing. It takes weeks for someone to become comfortable enough to run a service.
I just said that we probably will not upgrade MS to 4.0, and I mean it. I am looking very hard at ProPresenter. Why? Well, for starters look at the list above and from what I have seen about 4.0 they have not addressed the video playback issue. I do not understand this. With video being used every week, why would you not make your product work with the latest and greatest codecs? And all you Mac haters out there, don’t start with Macs are more expensive and all that crap. It is simply not true. In fact, our MS computer is a $2500 HP workstation. And it can’t playback an H.264 file without crashing. For less money I can get an iMac that will perform better.
Bottom line is that MediaShout is losing the battle to remain relevant.
Anyone have any other thoughts?
Yep… saw the post and appreciate the frustration. I’m not going to say ProPresenter is perfect, but we can play video well… as a matter of fact, I ran its sister product, ProVideoPlayer, on a $599 Mac mini with a TripleHead2Go this weekend at an event that had two 16′x9′ LED walls and one 32′x18′ LED wall. Mac hardware, even the cheap stuff, is quick, and it’s reliable.
Ken – Thanks for the review. We’re always interested in what our users have to say about our products and try to implement both positive and negative feedback into the development of good products. That being said, I’d love to comment on a few of your points:
1. QUICKTIME – We totally agree that our video engine is not up to our standards, especially in regards to Quicktime playback. Historically, QT hasn’t been a big deal, as its an Apple-native codec set and is not standard for any PC applications. Now that QT has become more prevalent even on the PC side, we do realize the need for supporting this great codec set. Unfortunately, in trying to make the most productive use of our limited resources in the development cycle, we’re now at a point where the video engine is the one lagging piece. When deciding what to include in Version 4, we could either focus on a more streamlined (ie – less clunky) interface and add a host of new features, or update our video engine, period. We determined that the best course of action was to add the new features and roll with the current video functionality used by thousands in V3 and hold off development of the video engine until later this year. Please understand that we DO see this as a problem, and intend to update this piece in the very near future. Until this takes place, we recommend using the WMV format (and exporting from OS X to WMV using the Flip4Mac codecs) – still a workaround, but gets the job done for now.
2. MediaShout does support both standard and custom aspect ratios for images and videos, as well as settings to either fill your screen or custom size the media for your output resolution. It sounds as if either (a) the preference for the video cue was set to ‘Full Stretch’ rather than ‘Full Scale’, which would have stretched the video oddly rather than scaling the original aspect ratio, or (b) the footage was rendered as an anamorphic widescreen video, fitting the 16:9 in a 4:3 frame, which you may have been battling there.
3. Great feature request. Currently MediaShout can dissolve from cue to cue, but not automatically to-and-from black. In most cases, users would rather cross-dissolve media straight into one another for seamless playback in a worship experience, but I have also had times where fading out to black would have been a great automatic tool to have. We’ll put this on our feature request list.
4. Check out Version 4, as we’ve tried to make the new interface much more intuitive and streamlined. You can download the trial for free and see if it’s a better solution for you. Visit our website and click the ‘Try It’ link in the lower-left corner to evaluate Version 4.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to email me at the account used with this post, or chat us up on Twitter: @mediashout.
Nate, thanks for the response. Please allow me to make a few remarks.
Again, thanks for responding. Maybe we can get some other users to dialog a little here as well.