Elisa Media Center

Friday, July 11, 2008

The media center project is going strong and I finally moved the Mythbuntu HTPC downstairs to the living room where my wife could start using it (and providing QA!). My wife found that Myth was very easy to use for recording TV and playing it back but that it was pretty lacking in other areas such as video, music and picture handling. I don't think it is any secret that Myth is pretty awful in these areas but it is understandable since the focus of Myth is the recording of TV and these other plugins came after.

So looking for an alternative solution I came across the Elisa Media Center. While Elisa is still relatively new, at version 0.35, it boasts an impressive amount of usability and eye candy for a program still in the early stages. Installing Elisa was a snap as it is available in the Synaptic package manager that comes with Mythbuntu. Once it is up and running you are presented with the lovely interface pictured below.

Configuring Elisa was a little more complicated, since it is still in early days no GUI exists for performing this task. Instead configuring Elisa requires editing elisa.conf which is fortunately pretty straight forward. It only took me a few minutes to add the locations for my videos, music and pictures to make them easily accessible within Elisa.

Adding support for the remote control was more of a pain though. By default Elisa uses a lirc mapping file called streamzap.lirc which is located in Elisa's python directory. Unfortunately it looks like there is a bug in that you can only change the name of the file, you cannot point it to a new location. As a result I copied streamzap.lirc to a new file and then modified it to meet my needs.

The remote control support at this stage, while usable is still pretty primitive in that there are only a small set of commands that can be mapped to the remote. Additionally I was unable to get the Play/Pause buttons on my remote working at all, however the Enter button acts as a toggle for these functions so that was an acceptable alternative. Once the remote was configured my wife much preferred using Elisa to the Myth front-end and now my next task is to figure out a way to rename and move Myth recorded shows to an Elisa directory automatically.

To summarize, Elisa has the potential to be a killer media front end and even at this early stage it shows a lot of polish and usability A very good effort by the developers so kudos to them.

As a footnote, Elisa is written in Python which is a language often criticized for poor performance. Elisa certainly goes some way to correcting my perception of Python and even makes me interested in having a go at creating a plugin in Python.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:36 AM | Categories: Home Theater | | | Permalink