Controlling Easyworship Remotely

At Cornerstone we have been using the program Easyworship for a couple of years now. We use it to project everything for our services: song lyrics, pictures, powerpoint files, Bible verses, videos, and dvd’s. I highly recommend Easyworship because it is extremely easy to operate. Even if you are not familiar with the program, you can learn how to operate it in minutes. At church, we have a dedicated desktop computer that runs Easyworship, but there have been several times for youth events or special services where we don’t have anybody there to run the system. I’ve had to run back and forth from the stage to the sound booth to get everything working.

I’ve stumbled upon a pretty interesting solution. At my last company, we used a program called RealVNC to troubleshoot computers from a central location. At home, I use it to control my desktop computer from anywhere in the house using my laptop. I even downloaded a VNC viewer for my ipod touch that lets me control my computer and see everything that is on the screen from my ipod. That made me think, could I do the same thing at church?

After a little experimentation, I’ve got it working. Since the church computer runs Windows Vista, I couldn’t get RealVNC to work, so I had to download the free UltraVNC server. After opening some ports on Windows firewall, it works great. From my macbook pro laptop, I can pull up and control the windows computer from anywhere in the building. So I could be on stage loading images or changing powerpoint files before they get put on the screen. For a smaller church or situation where you don’t have a full tech crew, this is a cool solution, and it even works from my ipod touch. I could envision a worship leader controlling the worship lyrics, or the pastor controlling and re-arranging his powerpoint during the message. Not ideal, but incredibly useful when you need it.

VNC is not known as the most secure screen sharing software, but it is on our internal church network and there is nothing confidential on this computer, so I’m not worried about the security. It is password protected to keep someone from taking control of the computer as a prank. Overall, it is pretty slick to see your entire windows desktop being controlled from another computer.

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 28 years, and we have three adult children.

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5 Responses

  1. Danny Davis says:

    Hi Mike,
    My name is Danny, I’m a worship Pastor in Houston, Texas and also work for a Church AV Design Build Firm. I was looking for info on remotes for Easy Worship and found your post. Sounds like you have come up with an innovative solution for having a “remote” that works for your Easy Worship. The VNC gives you access to the computer and the entire screen and functionality of the computer. Nice!

    I thought I might leave another idea for you that may be of help. We use Pro Presenter frequently in our installations in churches. It has all the same functionality of Easy Worship plus a few extras I have found. Originally Easy worship was windows only and ProPresenter was Mac only. ProPresenter is now also offered for Windows also.

    I have used both programs and although I started with Easy Worship, I transitioned to ProPresenter because of several additional functions they offer. One of these is a remote app for IOS devices. With a wifi router my iPad easily connects the password protected remote app directly to Pro Presenter on the computer. This gives easy remote access to the all the playlists I have created on the computer. It doesn’t give much editing options through the remote, but it is a handy free app that works great, and gives a choice of ways you can view the slides you are presenting.

    I have used it several times from the main floor of the church when we were running short of help in the booth upstairs.

    I’m not a dealer for ProPresenter and don’t make anything from the recommendation, but thought I would give you another option for controlling your presentations remotely. You can get a fully functional trial download from the renewed vision website. http://www.renewedvision.com

    Blessings on you and your church!
    Danny

  2. Stephen says:

    Hello pastors, my name is stephen, am just wondering if easy worship can work on ipad? I have been going front and back looking for a way to get it on my ipad with no luck, can you please point me in the right direction.

  3. John Mulhatton says:

    Hi everyone. We use EW with an app on my ipad called Air Keyboard. You can then customize the screen on the ipad to have large buttons for functions like Go Live and Next and then have smaller button for other functions. Only issue is that it is only a control surface, so there is no live view on the ipad.

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