ProPresenter is a great piece of presentation software for Windows and Mac. Many churches use it to display lyrics on-screen. One of the great features is the Stage Display – a cut-down output to show the current slide, next slide, clock and other information. The Stage Display can be output via a separate video output on your computer, or via the iPad and Android apps.
However, these output options aren’t always available or cost effective. To solve a problem on the events I work on, I’ve built a Python implementation of the ProPresenter Stage Display. It connects to your ProPresenter computer via the network socket, and displays the clock, current slide, and next slide on a basic display.
I’ve designed my Stage Display specifically to use on the Raspberry Pi – a cheap, single board computer. In Australia, you can buy a Raspberry Pi (with case, SD Card, Power Supply & Shipping) for about AU$100. Once setup, you can mount a Raspberry Pi behind a TV and have it automatically startup whenever the TV is turned on. The Raspberry Pi has a HDMI output (which also happens to be compatible with the Blackmagic Design ATEM), so connection to TVs is simple and easy.
UPDATE JANUARY 2018: You can now download the latest version of the app, and find out about new features, on the official webpage.
Find the Stage Display for Raspberry Pi on Github
Benefits of ProPresenter Stage Display for Raspberry Pi:
- Show your presenters & worship leads the current & next slides
- Free download
- Runs on a cheap Raspberry Pi
- Compatible with ProPresenter 6
- Easy to setup
- Open source
Here’s an exciting action shot of my Raspberry Pi 3 and a second-hand TV gracefully perched on the floor behind the holiness table at my church in Parramatta:
If you look closely at the right of this photo, you can see it running on a projector at Pulse (August 2017 – Dulwich Hill):
Installation on Raspberry Pi
- Download and install NOOBS with a desktop on your Raspberry Pi
- Connect your WiFi or Ethernet
- Open Terminal and run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install python2 git
git clone https://github.com/anthonyeden/ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/
echo "@/home/pi/ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/start.sh" >> .config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
cp ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/config-sample.json ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/config.json
- To edit the configuration, run this command:
nano ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/config.json
Ensure you update the IP Address, Port Number & Password for your ProPresenter computer. On your ProPresenter computer, this can be setup in Preferences > Network of your ProPresenter PC.
Press Ctrl + X to close the Nano text editor.
- The stage display should now load automatically whenever you login to your Raspberry Pi (there is a 10 second delay to give the Pi a chance to connect to the network). To start it manually, run the following commands from the terminal:
cd /home/pi/ProPresenter-Stage-Display-Python/
python2 StageDisplay.py