Elisa Windows Alpha version released and Elisa 0.5 architecture status report
Windows Alpha Release
The Elisa Media Center’s long-term goal is to provide end-users with a truly universal, interoperable, cross-platform media center. When we talk about ‘universal’ it is in regard to media (support all media types, local or online), universal with regard to devices (support & autodiscover all hardware: external disks, USB, MP3 players, remote controls), and universal with regard to device-to-device interoperability (UPnP, SMB, daap, etc). As a step towards those goals, the Elisa Media Center is releasing a first alpha version for Windows. Updated versions will follow, with a stable Windows version planned for June.
The Windows alpha release contains only the very basic features (with limited functionality) of the Elisa Media Center at this moment:
- Videos
- Music
- Photos
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Shoutcast
- Samba shares
- iPod
- remote control support
If you are brave enough to test this release, you can download the installer from the website and/or you can find the source-code in the windows branch of bazaar on launchpad:
bzr branch https://code.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/win32
Known issues
- codecs for DirectShow (ffdshow) have to be installed in order to play all media files
- sometimes colored lines appear in the UI
- YouTube video streaming doesn’t work
- audio cd’s are detected but playback doesn’t work
- playback of some media files can crash the application (H.264, some mpeg’s and mp4)
Elisa 0.5: New Web-like Software Architecture - Sneak Preview
Elisa Media Center now brings the web to the desktop with its fully modular software architecture.
For years, it has been too difficult for people to develop and contribute to stand-alone, desktop and embedded applications. Why? Meanwhile, web-technologies have attracted more and more developers with its clear and simple, yet sustainable way of building applications and mashup-services.
The Elisa Media Center has reached a milestone in its development cycle. It has achieved its original goal of providing an easy to develop modular platform that uses the web as inspiration. Following up on its motto ‘everything is a plugin’, Elisa is now completely pluggable from top (user interaction, graphical interface, etc.), to bottom (data retrieval, hardware communication, etc.). It borrows an analogy from the way components speak with each other over ‘REST’ webservices. Using 4 simple commands (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) integration of any service is natural and painless.
A fully fledged plugin/functionality can be added to Elisa with just a few lines of code (see tutorials). Although still a work in progress, we encourage everyone to join our efforts in making the Elisa Media Center a true portal between the web; local networks; and your PC/TV.
Getting Started
The easiest way to start hacking Elisa is to create your own branch. This allows you to publish to it so other developers and users can review it and even experiment with it.
Elisa uses Bazaar to create new development branches for later review and merging. Creating your own branch is an easy Bazaar command:
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/rest elisa
The above command will create a directory called ‘elisa’ containing the Elisa branch named ‘rest’. This branch is where the excitement begins and you will see what is happening development wise with Elisa nowadays. New developers are encouraged to review this and base their work from it.
This branch of Elisa relies on the latest development version of Pigment with a little twist for pigment-python. Here is the step by step procedure to get it up and running:
mkdir pigment cd pigment svn co https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/svn/trunk/pigment pigment svn co https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/svn/branches/pigment-python-widgets pigment-python cd pigment ./autogen.sh && make ./misc/pgm-uninstalled cd ../pigment-python ./autogen.sh && make
Then launch Elisa:
cd [your elisa branch] python elisa-core/elisa.py elisa.conf
What you should have displayed is the user interface from the weather plugin. Nothing greatly impressive but the technical basis is there to go much further very soon. In the next weeks the Elisa user interface will be rebuilt using the new architecture.
Documentation
Useful tutorials have been written to get you started easily:
- How to write a plugin that displays weather information
- How to write a plugin retrieving and displaying covers from Amazon
And of course the automatically generated API reference will help a lot.