Currently at our church we are using the windows program Worship Him for our projection system.
I of course, would love to switch that machine over to Linux if possible.
But I have yet to find a good worship service projection program for Linux that has the same features as Worship Him.
(note that we are running an older version as the latest requires XP, so some of the listed features are not available to use - like OO support)
So here's what I want (most of these are features found in WH, but some are things I would like to see or are things I would like improved over how WH does them):
WH does this quite well overall (a downside I will mention here and below in terms of additions needed).
You have your “playlist”, to which you can add songs from the song database, presentations (.pps, WH launches powerpoint/poweroint viewer to display them), images, and verses (it has a couple translations built in).
Now, what I would like is to be able to select songs from multiple listed databases (or maybe tables within a database). I.E. you could select the Praise Songs db/table and see only those items, or select Hymns to see those (I'm thinking at this point a single db with multiple tables or maybe just a field for song type or genre or something would be best).
This is one of my major annoyance with WH.
While you can have multiple song dbs, you can only pull songs from a single one into the playlist.
WH has the import feature and it is quite nice.
The song database editor lets you add and edit songs, as well as import from text files exported by the CCLI service.
However as mentioned above, you can only have one active db for your playlist, so you end up just putting everything into one, which is rather annoying and chaotic.
WH does this quite well overall.
You have you playlist, where you can select items from.
When you select a presentation, it launches powerpoint/powerpoint viewer and tosses it to the monitor specified to project on (i.e. monitor 2 in our case).
Then you use the keyboard (or move the mouse to the screen it's projecting on) to control it as usual.
When you select an item from the song database to project, it shows the various slides in two rows of small boxes (verses on top, choruses on bottom) at the top of the screen and you click each one to show it (there are also buttons below to advance to the next part of the current slide if the program has determined it to have too much text and has auto-split it into two slides).
This works well overall, but could be improved.
Such as when there are more boxes than will fit on the screen, always making sure that at least one slide on both sides of the current slide are showing (currently you have to scroll to the right manually to view more of the slides, which gets annoying when you have like 10 slides in the song).
You also have instant access to the current song database as well, so you can instantly pull up a song you don't have in the playlist.
There is also a screen blank button to blank the projection screen (quite useful of course).
WH has a bunch more features but I don't really use them.
Obviously a Linux program should be setup to use OpenOffice Impress for running slide shows, and should support configuring extensions and modifying the launch command (of course by default it should have support for ppt and pps as well as the appropriate openoffice extensions).
WH has a couple Bible translations built in/available, but having the projection program link to the Sword system and being able to pull from all available modules would be quite nice.
So I think that pretty much covers it.
I just need a nice multi-monitor handling program with good playlist management, projection control, and a good song database system and I could switch that machine to Linux.
Anyone up for the challenge?