1. 1.I am glad that you see the video portion of MS lagging. I would have thought that all of the money spent several years ago on your failed Mac version would have gotten you a little closer on this, but I guess that is not the case. As for Flip4Mac, yes, that is a viable workaround, but it is expensive, and adds another layer of difficulty for the end user.
2. 2.Thanks for the tip on Aspect Ratio. I will try that, but even when we have set it manually to Full Scale it does not seem to work correctly.
3. 3.I’m glad to hear that this may be included in another release. I guess that this goes to my non-linear way of thinking. Sometimes elements in a production need to be able to stand alone and fade in, fade out functionality is needed. This is one thing that ProPresenter does out of the box (I think, I will have to go back and check on that.).
4. 4.We may do this, but the remaining issue with reduced video functionality is a big hindrance to us. We will be using a lot more video in the coming months and being able to play back h.264 material reliably is huge.

Again, thanks for responding. Maybe we can get some other users to dialog a little here as well.

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.