Elisa: Ubuntu Media Centre

The Ubuntu Media Centre Team have decided to use Elisa as their core infrastructure to push the free software media centre effort forward. Elisa is a open source cross-platform media centre, designed to be as simple to use as possible. The software is in its early days and so is still quite basic in terms of features found in other media centre solutions. However, the project is gaining momentum and is improving rapidly. Here's a list of some of its features.

• Elisa supports a wide range for media formats through the use of the GStreamer multimedia framework, including but not limited to Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, Matroska, MPEG 2, MPEG4, Quicktime and Windows Media. Commercially licensed plugins that work with GStreamer and Elisa are available from Fluendo.
• Elisa supports playing both local music files and web radio stations. So if your media center is connected to your hi-fi system you can use it as a web radio tuner or you can use it as a jukebox for your own music files.
• Elisa supports any remote control supported by the linux infrared control project, this includes many of the most popular infrared remote controls out there.
• Elisa can view photos and images in all the most common formats used like jpeg and png. Elisa can also do simple manipulation of the photos like rotating photos that are taken in portrait mode.
• Elisa supports playing back DVD’s
• Elisa is cross platform allowing you to install it on both GNU/Linux and Unix systems, but also on Windows systems.
• Elisa supports DLNA compliant upnp multimedia devices. This means photos, music and videos shared from such devices are available in Elisa. Elisa is also able to share its own files to upnp enabled devices.
• Elisa can act as a DAAP client so as to browse and play music files shared on the network by iTunes, Banshee or Rhythmbox
• Elisa is also able to browse and display pictures shared on Flickr

Here's some screenshots of it in action.






Here's some planned features to make Elisa a fully fledged media centre solution.

• Full TV viewing and PVR capabilities, including features such as time- shifting
• Full integration and compliance with Intel’s ViiV devices
• Trick mode support, both client and serverside. Offering features such as fast forward, slow motion and reverse playback.
• DAAP music sharing support for iTunes, Banshee and Rhythmbox integration.
• Videoconferencing and Voice over IP. We will add support for videoconferencing and voice over IP to Elisa.
• Elisa is a very flexible and themable system. We expect a wide range of user developed plug-ins to be available for it allowing people to add features to their hearts desire.

Update: A new version is available, Elisa 0.33 includes some of the following additions:

• Important improvements of mouse support in the interface
• Playback from DAAP shares support (iTunes, Rhythmbox, etc.)
• New YouTube plugin
• Coloured and synchronised visualisation when playing music
• Faster startup and more efficient memory usage
• Better detection of media thanks to GStreamer
• Simple playlist support

Link:
Elisa