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St George and St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church has published the Lenten version of their Coptic Presentation Application. Just like the annual version, this presentation is in English, Coptic and Arabic and can be run from any Windows machine with Microsoft PowerPoint or PowerPoint viewer.

Monday night we had a Bible study at our house, it was given by Bishop Paul, the bishop of Mission Affairs. By the grace of God it was attended by over 70 people (I think that is a record for our family room). During the day I got lots of requests to stream the Bible study, so I put together a quick solution. Thank God, it worked out great and we had 33 people streaming. Here is a mini-howto on how I had it setup on Monday.

Note: This is a very basic setup, see my previous post, Tech we Use: Part 2 – Streaming and Recording, for more information on the full setup we use at church.

Items Needed:
Video Camera with Firewire
Windows PC with Firewire
Windows Media Encoder 9 (free)

Optional:
External Microphone
Windows Media Services

Before starting you will need to figure out where you will host your stream. Windows Media Encoder can host up to four streams which is about the max most home/office Internet connections can handle. To support more clients, we use a dedicated Windows server running Windows Media Services on a 100 Mb connection at ServerBeach. Other options are services such as Christian Video Channel, VitalStream or ChurchQuest (plans start at $8.95/month).

If you will be hosting on your own, make sure you have sufficient upstream bandwidth. We usually run a 387 Kbps stream, which with a 2 Mbit upstream you could serve 4 to 5 clients. (There is quite a bit of overhead due to buffering, etc.) Also, you will have to open a few ports on your firewall.

For this example we will be using our dedicated windows server.

1. Connect video camera to PC via firewire, Windows XP should automatically detect it.

2. Fire up Windows Media Encoder, the new session wizard should pop, select the “Broadcast a live event” wizard.

3. Under Device Options, select your video camera for both the video and audio (unless you are using an external mic connected to the sound card).

4. We will push to our Windows Media server, this avoids opening inbound ports on the firewall.

5. Server and Publishing Point
Server Name: DNS or IP address of server running Windows Media Services
Publishing Point: Choose a name for your stream (does not need to already exist)

6. Under Encoding Options we chose the default setting of 387 Kbps under “Live Broadcast video”

7. We usually don’t archive the file using the streaming box because of the reduced quality (recording quality is based on the Encoding Options we just chose), we just slide a tape into the camcorder.

8. We don’t include any videos for an intro or conclusion, but you can easily do so.

9. Add in all the relevant information about your stream.

10. Review the settings and click finish.

11. You will be prompted for a user name and password, enter an account that will allow you to create/manage publishing points on the streaming server.

12. Start Encoding

13. Tell your users to point their web browsers to http://servername/publishingpoint

St George and St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church along with other Coptic churches in the Northeast are doing a great job putting together a presentation application (PowerPoint based) that contains most of the church’s services, including the readings, liturgies, songs and Agpeya. The presentation is in English, Coptic and Arabic and can be run from any Windows machine with Microsoft PowerPoint or PowerPoint viewer. They are constantly updating the application, here is the latest update and the fonts required to view it.

Updated: The x-ray to the right is of my root canal, not just an example.

I had my first root canal performed today, it wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. That may partly be to having a great dentist, if you are in the area (Sterling, VA – off Route 7) I highly recommend Dr. Amear Tadros, he is a friend and member of St. Mark’s.

Dr. Tadros also happens to be running some very cool tech, including digital x-rays, a digital camera that can do video and photos inside your mouth, and running video for the patient to watch on a screen coming down from the ceiling.

Penguin.swf announced the final version of Flash Player 9 for Linux (x86) today. This release is a much needed accomplishment for desktop Linux, with Firefox and Flash 9, the vast majority of websites are now workable.

There is a thread on Ubuntu Forums on how to install it without waiting for the repositories to update. I used this method successfully.

For those of you who haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, Lifehacker highlights a new Windows installer prototype that lets your run Ubuntu without messing with anything – I don’t think it gets much easier that!

I don’t care much for shopping at brick and mortar stores so I end up doing the vast majority of my shopping online (for both personal and church). I can usually find what I want, don’t have to worry about it being in stock and get it at a better price. Here are the sites I usually use, what do you use?

General
Amazon.com
Costco.com
Wal-Mart

Tech
Buy.com
Newegg.com
Geeks.com
CDW

AudioVisual
B&H
The Media Supply Store

Printing
GotPrint.com

Clothing
Dickies

Used and Specialty Items
eBay
Craigslist

Deals
eDealinfo.com
Woot

Price Comparison
Froogle

Reviews
Google Blog Search
TripAdvisor

We started a trial with Katharion’s anti-spam service two weeks ago, so far the results look good. All our users are saying that they are getting almost no spam, max of one or two in the past two weeks. Also, no one has reported any false positives.

Yesterday, we setup access lists on our firewall so that only Katharion’s servers can talk to our mail server.

Looks like we are below average on the percentage of spam…