Tech Forum

Greetings!
I know some of you may say read the forum below:
http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... 344cef5eb4#

Let me just say I have and have emailed and asked a few questions. My question is as follows: has anyone else came up with a setup that works well. Our needs are the same as mentioned in the above forum. Seminary, Church Meetings, and Leadership training. With everything these days on the internet our buildings DSL of 1.5 Max down just will not cut the demand there is for content. Has anyone heard anything from the CHQ of things that may be coming out? If so is there a tentative timeline for the roll out of this? I would hate to get a set up up and running than have something delivered from HQ and have to retrain everyone and than have a fair amount of media stuff no longer used. So any thoughts or a description of current up and running setups would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help.

You might want to browse THIS thread which is a bit more recent, particularly post #6. Sorry, the church is not very forthcoming with timelines on projects like this.

Even if you did have a fast connection, there's nothing to prioritize it's use. Nor are we promised that the church servers can handle the load in during a class. We've been told to download content before class to our playback device.

While I think they have looked at the issue, I don't know of any plans to roll out such a local media server, much less an expected date. But then they rarely announce anything until its introduction.

russellhltn wrote:Even if you did have a fast connection, there's nothing to prioritize it's use. Nor are we promised that the church servers can handle the load in during a class. We've been told to download content before class to our playback device.

While I think they have looked at the issue, I don't know of any plans to roll out such a local media server, much less an expected date. But then they rarely announce anything until its introduction.

Further, the documents sent out by the FMG when Come Follow Me was released specifically mentioned that showing videos was not a reason to increase bandwidth, or shouldn't be used as a justification.

I'm a little more hopeful that the solution is coming, my guess is 2015. Man can we hasten a work or what!

I've also been mulling it over and its a simple solution. Don't rely on the meeting house network.
My plan is to download all content and put it all on a central local media server with a nice searchable menu and interface (theres many out there, especially opensource).
Or even simpler, a couple 64GB USB drives preloaded and stored in the library will do the trick. To make offline content syncing easier, it can be as easy as the church just supplying a secure FTP server where the librarian can easily grab content. Basically, the librarians job description will change a little, to occasionally sync conference/mormon message content etc. I will experiment with a media server, but it will only work as an offline, local only streaming network, with its own router offering decent WIFI speeds and/or (even better) wired Gigabit LAN points to each room in the chapel. Easy, if you got a LAN point you just plug in with your media player like a humble Raspberry Pi and off you go. Essentially, there's many ways to achieve some sort of decent service to offer the members. I will post how it goes.

I'm just now seeing this two years later, but how did it go?

With 2016 adult curriculum I doubt we'll see anything from the church until at least the 2017 time frame

Today we did our conference media using a Raspberry Pi and XBMC.
The playback was flawless and I downloaded the 1080p files. I believe this is the best way to advance the Media Server option for meetinghouses.
I'm happy to write up a solution on how to do it and anyone who would like to implement the Media Server solution can also just pm me.
Essentially a Raspberry Pi is a fully fledged computer and can be configured to show ANY media. It costs around $60 and setting it up is a breeze.
The easiest if just to save your media to a flash drive and plug it in to the Pi and off you go. Easy.
For audio, I just use my portable sound bar. There are a few options.
To take things a step further, each unit can be issued with a media storage drive on a wired network that gets synced from church media servers. Each classroom just needs a CAT6 cable run in and there you have a really nice solution.
PS: I see there is a session this year at LDSTECH conference, talking about meeting house tech, lets see what they share