Free projection software options

I know how it goes--if you're serving a small, under-resourced (read, "broke") church, someone donated a video projector, maybe even a computer, too, but software (even basic stuff) might be out of the question for a while. But you are not without options. Here are a couple of solutions that work just fine and won't set you back hundreds of dollars--they're free.

ImpressSome churches get along just fine using Powerpoint for projection, and fortunately, there is a great open-source alternative called Impress. It's part of the OpenOffice.org suite of applications, all of which are powerful programs, and most of which can produce MS-Office-compatible documents. There are versions of OpenOffice for Windows, MacOS, and Linux--in fact, many Linux distributions come with OpenOffice already included. (And if you're really strapped for cash, why not use a free OS, too?)

OpenLPThe other option is actually open source lyric projection software: it's called OpenLP, and you can get it at http://openlp.org. I've played with OpenLP just a little while, and granted, not under the optimal conditions (I actually ran it under Vista, running on Parallels on my MacBook Pro). No, you won't get the same bells and whistles and nerd-knobs that you'll find on the commercial products like Media Shout, Easy Worship, ProPresenter and others, but if you need to get the job done for free, OpenLP seems to be up to the task.

One advantage of OpenLP, particularly for the cash-strapped church, is that its system requirements are fairly modest, compared with some of the commercial packages out there, meaning that you can probably run OpenLP on hardware that might be adequate to run the commercial apps. You'd be hard-pressed to run Easy Worship on a 500 MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, but that's the minimum for OpenLP on Windows at this time. (I think this may mean that you could potentially run OpenLP on a netbook-type PC, though I haven't actually tried it yet.)

Although this isn't for the faint of heart, you can compile OpenLP for Linux, and apparently there are a few hearty souls who've gotten it running on MacOS, as well (I've seen the screenshots!).

OpenLP is currently at version 1.x; there is talk of version 2, and I'll be watching for it--this could be pretty cool, particularly if a user community arises around OpenLP as such communities have arisen around certain other open-source projects. The beginnings of that community are there--there is already a collection of user-contributed themes available for download.