The Elisa Media Center project [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
July 23, 2008

Elisa Media Center is a cross-platform (Windows Vista, XP, and Linux, eventually Mac) media management project that is sponsored by Fluendo. The company is also known for its sponsorship of the GStreamer multimedia framework. The Elisa project's home page explains:

Elisa is an open source cross-platform Media Center featuring an intuitive interface with a professional look and feel which can be easily used with a standard TV remote control. Elisa is designed to be easily extensible through plugins. It relies on Python and Twisted as core technologies.

Elisa can manage movies, photographs, and music. It can work with media from locally connected peripherals, other machines on the LAN and the Internet. The software includes support for IR remotes and touchscreens. Elisa uses a modular design with support for plugins which give the system access to various media sites and other information. A fairly out of date feature list explains the capabilities in more detail. A good way to see the capabilities of the software is to take a look at the flashy demo video and screenshots.

Following on heels of the recently announced version 0.5.1 (the initial public 0.5 series release), version 0.5.2, entitled "Good news everyone" was announced this week:

The main outlines of this release are: - The integration of a media scanner that indexes one's music collection and allows one to browse it by Artists/Albums, with automatic albums' covers and artists' photos retrieval; - The localization of the UI. Thanks to contributions from the community Elisa is currently fully translated in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese.

The Elisa source code is available for download, packaged versions for Ubuntu and Debian should appear soon.

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The Elisa Media Center project

Posted Jul 24, 2008 11:01 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

What distinguishes this one from the other 371 similar projects, some of which being
significantly highe-profile and more mature ?

In other words, why should we care ? I don't mean to sound negative, I'm genuinely curious
what the advantage is. (or what it is supposed to become)

The Elisa Media Center project

Posted Jul 24, 2008 21:37 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I don't know. Maybe because there isn't 371 projects?

You have Mythtv, Geexbox, Linux-MCE, XMBC...

Out of those Geexbox and Linux-MCE is a entire distribution. XMBC hasn't had a release yet for
Linux that I am aware of (although that is one of their goals), and Mythtv is oriented towards
advanced users and can be confusing and difficult to use.

Mythtv has the definite advantage that it has DVR capabilities. Elisa does not have that yet.

But Elisa is also oriented for a greater audience then Mythtv.

-----------------------------------

Plus in the modern era we have uPnP/DLNA. DLNA is a closed standard, but is a subset of uPnP
so people will support it without having the certification done.

This means that these projects don't have to be competitors.

For example with my Playstation 3 it has some basic built-in media playback capabilities and
will detect uPnP stuff automatically over your network. Same thing with Vista's "Windows Media
Player".

I can stream video over the network quite easily with Mythtv's uPnP capabilities and with
Mediatomb on my file server. Now the PS3 has very limited codec, but I am just saying that due
to the standard these software 'media centers' and 'media extenders' can work together to
varying degrees of success.

"Good" uPnP support for Vista is one of Microsoft's "secret weapons" that they are not making
a big fuss over. This is because they don't want
people to know how it works, but that it "just works".

So now we are going to start seeing a huge upswing in devices that support that protocol for
all sorts of different purposes and it's important for Linux to have decent support. (even
though it's insecure as hell).

So theoretically I could do things like:

* Have Mythtv Front end hooked up to my big screen TV. (or have it embedded in my TV like with
the Asus EEE TVs)

* Have Mythtv backend running in the basement doing double duty as a file server with
Mediatomb or other project broadcasting my music, images, and videos.

* Have Gnome GVFS support uPnP so that applications like Totem can play back video, Rhythmbox
with music, EOG with Images, and use GVFS fuse bindings and djmount for file system level
access to my "uPnP network".

As well as Epiphany support so that I can access the web-based configuration on all these
devices (which is part of the standard, they run on a random high numbered port and broadcast
to your browser or media center)

* Have a touch screen-enabled tablet PC running as a media jukebox with Elisa that is hooked
up to a projector and/or my high-fi stereo for entertaining at parties.

etc etc.

People are already running these things in their houses right now. A couple times I've seen
people with Vista laptops discover capabilities built into people's networks that those people
didn't really know about.

The Elisa Media Center project

Posted Jul 24, 2008 13:31 UTC (Thu) by griffbrad (subscriber, #42805) [Link]

I've been using Elisa since the 0.3 series and it works really nicely.  The interface is very
simple (it's nearly a clone of Apple TV's UI).  The frontend is very modular and written in
Python, meaning there is a growing list of plugins for online services like YouTube, Flickr,
DailyMotion, etc.  And being based on GStreamer, it will play essentially anything you can
throw at it if you have the proper codecs installed.  

Personally, I've found Elisa much more fitting to my habits than something like MythTV.  My
media generally comes from the Web (podcasts, Web servcies, etc.) much more so than actual
television.  Elisa's simple and beautiful UI manages that use case with ease.