Hello Eliseros!
Here are some very good news from the Windows port front and the 0.5
series :)
Windows Alpha Release
---------------------
Elisa's long-term goal is to provide end-users with a truly universal,
interoperable, cross-platform media center. As a step towards these
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 [1] and/or you can find the source-code in
the win32 bazaar branch 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 cds are detected but playback doesn't work
* playback of some media files can crash the application (H.264,
some mpegs and mp4)
Elisa 0.5 developer preview
---------------------------
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 (hopefully :)).
A fully fledged plugin/functionality can be added to Elisa with just a
few lines of code (see tutorials at the bottom). 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 on 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
Finally you can launch Elisa like that:
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 [2]
* How to write a plugin retrieving and displaying covers from Amazon
[3]
And of course the automatically generated API reference [4] will help a
lot.
That's it folks! At least for now :) Questions, ideas, remarks are of
course always welcome.
Have a lot of fun and a very nice weekend,
Florian on behalf on the Elisa team
[1] http://elisa.fluendo.com/download
[2]
http://elisa.fluendo.com/documentation/tutorials/weather_plugin_tutorial.html
[3] http://elisa.fluendo.com/documentation/tutorials/amazon
[4] http://elisa.fluendo.com/api
