Ditch Powerpoint
Free Open Source Software For Your Sermons
What software do you use during your Sunday church services? As evidenced by the many sites like our own still offering the antiquated MPEG1 format, lots of people are using PowerPoint. Other than the cost of purchasing Microsoft Office, one of the big draw-backs of PowerPoint is lack of support for any video formats other than MPEG1.
What's so bad about MPEG1? Well, file size, mostly. A five minute video in MPEG1 with decent quality will run well over 100MB while the same video of equal quality in MPEG4/XVID format will be 1/3rd the size. That means 3 times faster download for you and 1/3rd the space taken up on your hard drive.
We'd like to tell you about a PowerPoint alternative: Impress, which is part of the OpenOffice suite. It's free and works very much like Microsoft PowerPoint. It will even open and play all your old PowerPoint files. Save your church some licensing fees! Not only that, but you can embed any type of video file that works in Windows Media Player. So between this and the open source Xvid codec you can now embed the MPEG4/XVID files we offer, cutting your download times and file storage requirements by 70%.
Note: In our own experimentation with OpenOffice, we came across one small bug, but it is easy enough to remedy. If you want to embed video files in a presentation, the first slide must contain a video. If you don't, only the sound will play when you transition to the slide with the video. If you're thinking that won't work well for the way you set up your presentations, don't worry! All you need to do is put a very small video with no sound somewhere out of site on the first slide. Here is something I whipped up in one minute using Windows Movie Maker, which is included on every windows system: ggm_tinyvideo.wmv. It worked great for us.
So give it a try. What do you have to lose? We hope it can save you some time and your congregation some money.
