Elisa, the Media Center

Filed in archive Entertainment on May 13, 2007

If you are looking for an open source, cross-platform media center, look no further for Elisa is here. Currently, only Linux (and other Unix-based operating systems) and Windows are supported but Mac OS X will soon be supported. Some of the features of Elisa are:

- 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.

- 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.

- supports any remote control supported by the linux infrared control project, this includes many of the most popular infrared remote controls out there.

- 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.

- supports playing back DVDs

- is cross platform allowing you to install it on both GNU/Linux and Unix systems, but also on Windows systems.

- 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.

- can act as a DAAP client so as to browse and play music files shared on the network by iTunes, banshee or Rhythmbox

- is also able to browse and display pictures shared on Flickr

(image from the Elisa site)