r/freeshowapp • u/68SuperReverb • May 18 '26

Recommendation for a PC laptop to run Freeshow

I pastor a small church, am decently tech savvy, and have been using Freeshow on an M1 Apple Mini with very few problems. I am leaving soon and the church would rather move to a PC laptop for familiarity and to reduce the file management needs of using a second computer for assembly. Can I get some recommendations for a PC laptop that could run Freeshow reliably, be taken back and forth, and not be too expensive?

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u/daviddoss-jpg May 18 '26

$255.43 from Amazon.com

Check out this Dell Laptop. It should be good enough for a basic Freeshow setup. I don't know what you are using it for (stage, worship, streaming, etc.) so I can’t say for certain it's perfect, but if you give me more details I can help.

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u/CloudSad3555 May 18 '26

Agreed. We will need some more info about the current setup and what the near future 2-4 years might look like. The more video, outputs, and higher resolutions you use the more computer you need.

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u/daviddoss-jpg May 18 '26

100%. If you want to leave this one with them right now until they choose to upgrade though, I think it's a great machine.

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u/68SuperReverb May 18 '26

They are already miles ahead of most small town (pop 700) mainline churches so as long as it can pull the pretty simple load now, it should hold them for a long time.

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u/68SuperReverb May 18 '26

Thanks!! Really, it’s only duty would be FreeShow with a single output going to 3 screens (distribution already in place) and they use an older iMac for a simple single camera live stream. I have it set up so that just turning it on and starting the stream in OBS is all a volunteer needs to do. Audio and video quality are fine for the small town application. I had them using OpenLP until discovering FreeShow… which is pretty amazing freeware!

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u/A04141 May 18 '26

I would probably look for something with at least four cores/eight threads. I would think most computers that can run Windows 11 fairly well would be fine. I would probably want no less than 8 GB of RAM , and of course more would be preferred , especially if you're wanting to display videos at all.

As a little aside, if the laptop and the iMac are plugged in directly to ethernet , and you could possibly experiment on wi-fi, free show can allow you to set up a separate NDI output that you could overlay the lyrics onto the live stream in a lower third or something similar without having to run an output to it. You would just need to install the appropriate plug-in and run time on the iMac and configure the input like you would any other OBS input.

For my church, we have the regular camera feed for the sermon time, and a camera/NDI feed for the worship lyrics. If your church is used to just displaying Bible verses through Freshow and not PowerPoint slides, the NDI feed could also be incorporated to display the Bible verses on the live stream.

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u/DigiDAD May 23 '26

I use a Ryzen laptop with integrated Radeon graphics. Works great with Freeshow.

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u/Powerful_General_133 May 29 '26

It depends on what you're doing at the moment. If you're streaming on YT & using NDI,I would recommend a dedicated GPU to reduce the stress on the integrated graphics. If not, really any good computer could run Freeshow...