Last night I setup elisa 0.3.1 using the recently posted Ubuntu Feisty packages. Overall, I'm very impressed. I also installed the Fluendo codec bundle to allow for playback of a variety of video and audio formats. It seems to be a very simple and well though UI once setup. I did encounter a handful of issues, though:
1) I watched an h.264 encoded video (encoded with HandBrake) and it looked great. However, after adjusting volume or seeking, the audio/video sync would get bumped off track a bit. The video appeared to be just a hair behind the audio. Exiting the video and then returning to it (fast-forwarding to my previous position) fixed it at least temporarily. 2) Whenever there is a lot of movement on the screen, a big sweeping motion of the camera, the movement gets a bit jerky as if it's dropping frames. I'm running this on an Athlon X2 4600+ and, at least judging from top output, am only using about 20% of one core to play this video. The video chip is an on-board Nvidia GeForce. And playing the same video in mplayer or other players doesn't exhibit these problems. One possibility that crossed my mind was enabling XvMC, but I couldn't determine if that was possible for gstreamer. 3) I tried watching a 720p wmv from IGN and it would play the first few seconds of video and then stop. No audio at all. Same file played in mplayer. 4) I downloaded the Theora Large version of the latest Totally Rad Show episode (http://www.totallyradshow.com) and tried browsing to it in elisa. However, the folder I'd put the show into, while visible, did not have the little bouncing arrow indicating I could look inside and, in fact, wouldn't allow me to access the video. 5) I have a music library containing approximately 165 artists. Scrolling through the list can be a bit difficult because you have to scroll for a short period to get the speed of the scroll up and then stop a few times to check your current position in the list. It also seems that the current UI may be a bit sub-optimal for situations where you don't already know what you want to listen to. In that case, you have to step through each artist-album one at a time instead of being able to get an idea of what's available at a glance. 6) I couldn't figure out how to change volume or track position while playing audio. There was no OSD to indicate the options I had once I started playing the music. 7) I encountered a confusing behaviour when browsing music by folder, which perhaps shouldn't be the item selected by default when going into Audio. My music folder is organized by artist and then album. I browsed to "Andrew Bird," then "Armchair Apocrypha." While the tracks were listed in the correct order on the right-hand side of the "Play All" icon, upon clicking "Playing All" it appeared to play the album in a random order. 8) When first seeing the listing of videos, my girlfriend remarked on the fact that the video thumbnails looked nice. However, when browsing music, the artist icons and song icons look repetitive and don't really communicate any useful information. Not quite sure what to do here, but I think (from looking at Banshee's music recommendations plugin, for instance) that grabbing artist photos using Last.fm might be a really slick touch. 9) I couldn't intuit what the logic behind the zoomed out video display was. For instance, I would be watching a video clip, press stop on my remote and there would be nothing on the screen other than the list of video files. However, if I browsed up to the highest level in the hierarchy of my videos, just before returning to the home screen carousel, a freeze frame of the video I had just been watching would appear. Seemed odd. 10) I think it might be worthwhile to at least offer the option to resume a video I was watching at the position I had reached before stopping. 11) I couldn't get access to any DAAP shares. Tried starting banshee w/ DAAP sharing enabled, but saw no options in the Network section of my music. 12) Couldn't determine how to enable the flickr and youtube features shown in the screencast. 13) My elisa.conf has one folder for music and one folder for videos. However, when I browse these sections, the first thing I see is a single icon saying "videos" or "music," which are the names of the two folders. If I only have one location for a type of media specified in my elisa.conf, I'd expect to not have to explicitly select that location before browsing my media. 14) I know this is simply a preference, but I think the blurring of the icons in back of the home screen carousel is too pronounced. I know that's a lot of criticism, but I really am very excited about elisa. I'd really like to get away from MythTV and elisa is already nicer in several ways (not having to manually re-scan the folders for new media, the UI, the planned "just works" network features, the simple controls). Thanks so much for all your work! Cheers, Brad Griffith
