Last day of VBS 2005

It’s over! Vacation Bible School has come to a close. And a fantastic end it was. I spent the afternoon doing so many things I can’t keep track of it all.

For VBS, though, I put together the schedule (which I’ve done every day), which only took a few minutes. Then came a real project — creating a video of the week from the stuff my mom captured over the last two days.

The result is something that I am proud of. It’s nice, looks well-organized, and is fun to watch. Of course, I have to give credit where due. Tony added a lot of enthusiasm to the start of the video. And everyone else in the video did great, too.

Wow!

At the last minute, we had some issues getting the video to work. Praise the Lord that I found what was wrong just in time…

The main church computer has issues playing back realtime video and/or sound. It skips and pauses, making it look terrible.

So I borrowed someone’s laptop to play the video. This involved plugging the system in and setting it up to work with the projector. The sound also had to be plugged into the headphone port.

In my post about the Mac mini detecting the monitor connected, I didn’t really mention the Windows equivalent. Well, in Windows, it detects whether there’s a monitor connected, too. You can’t enable the external monitor port if there was no monitor plugged in when Windows tried to detect it.

This was a problem because the laptop was already on when I connected it. There was no way to enable or switch to the external monitor.

I tried a few things. First, the easiest and fastest thing to do was put the system into hibernation. As I mentioned in my Mac mini post, the Mac detects the monitor when waking from sleep mode. Windows does not do this when coming out of hibernation.

Luckily, I tried something else, too, that is significantly faster than rebooting entirely. I logged out, and logged back in. This did the trick. I could then use the Fn key combo to switch to the external monitor.

Then, we had trouble getting the sound to work. This was just moments before the video was supposed to be played. There was no sound coming from the video. We checked many times that all volume controls were turned up and the sound was not muted. At just the last moment, I discovered that the mute button in Windows Media Player was enabled. Clicking that button did the trick, and the video played (mostly) flawlessly after that.