The Elisa Media Center project

[Posted July 12, 2006 by cook]

Fluendo has announced the initial release of the Elisa Media Center:

Elisa is a project to create an open source cross platform media center solution. While our primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems we also currently support Microsoft Windows and also hope to support MacOSX in the future. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework. In addition to personal video recorder functionality (PVR) and Music Jukebox support, Elisa will also interoperate with devices following the DLNA standard like Intel's ViiV systems.

[Elisa Media Center] The current feature list of Elisa includes:

The ability to play music, video and images.
Support for Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, Matroska, MPEG 2, MPEG4, Quicktime and Windows Media formats.
Support for web radio station playback.
Support for DVD playback.
The display of jpeg and png images with image rotation capabilities.
Remote control support via the Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) project.
Support for the connection to Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) compatible multimedia devices.
Support for interoperability with Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) format servers.
Cross-platform operation on Linux, Unix and Windows.
Support for OpenGL 1.3 rendering.
An Extensible plugin framework for user-added features.

Planned features for upcoming releases include:

Support for Personal Video Recorder (PVR) features such as video time shifting.
Support for Intel ViiV multimedia hardware.
The ability to do fast-forward, slow motion and reverse playback of media.
Support for videoconferencing and Voice over IP (VoIP).

The Elisa project FAQ answers some common questions and explains the software's licensing: "The core Elisa system is licensed under the GPL with a special exception for use with the proprietary Fluendo plugins and DVD player. The plug-ins are mostly licensed under the MIT license."

The initial release of Elisa, version 0.0.1, was announced this week.

The 0.0.x series is aimed at developers and early adopters with later releases targeting the wider user community. This particular release is mainly a technology preview aimed to show the current features and user interfaces of Elisa to enable us to get early feedback and input from the wider community. The APIs are subject to change very soon though.

For a look at Elisa in action, take a look at the screenshots page, the code is available for download here.

The Elisa Media Center project

Posted Jul 14, 2006 9:57 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder if it can do frame-by-frame single-stepping. For some reason that feature is routinely omitted from Free Software media frameworks (xine, mplayer, gstreamer), despite that every cheap DVD player does it. I would be happy to learn that this omission has been rectified; if you know of places where it has been, please reply.

The Elisa Media Center project

Posted Jul 14, 2006 18:30 UTC (Fri) by dbg400 (guest, #141) [Link] (1 responses)

mplayer does single frame advance - use the . keyboard control. From the man page:

. Step forward. Pressing once will pause movie, every consecutive press will play one frame and then go into pause mode again (any other key unpauses).

Regards, Martin

single-frame stepping

Posted Jul 24, 2006 11:28 UTC (Mon) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> . Step forward.

Nice to know! Apparently mplayer can't do back-stepping yet, like e.g. avidemux (which is an editor, not really a player) is able to. Of course going back is more work ...