Fluendo have kept this pretty quiet. I had the opportunity to not only play with the software but have a very long conversation with one of the developers at Guadec. You can find the software home page here http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/ following is a paraphrase of the discussion I had with the developers.
To begin with I was interested in the project as a competitor to freevo, which admittedly it is. The developer told me that they had looked at freevo, and looked at myth and they saw some user interface issues and some compatibility issues which made both projects unworkable from their perspective. Their objectives are to release a multimedia platform for windows, linux and mac osx using the gstreamer framework, open GL and python.
Features of this application will blow you away, smooth animations through GL, compositing in a pure GL environment so you have things like video icons playing movies as well as the full screen movie. There are various features lacking, i.e. imdb lookup and various other freevo niceties, the feature set is still in the very early stages and it looks like a very promising project and most importantly it is commercially driven.
Fluendo have said that they will continue to release this software open source, and for a nominal fee provide proprietary codecs (1$ for real, 3$ for WMV/WMA) which they have negotiated with microsoft and real. This is not however the commercial end of their endeavours, in fact they will be offering these codecs at cost price acting more like a go between than a reseller.
The real commercial aspect of their software is centred around their commercial products which are already lined up, including an own built media centre and a few other manufacturers including phillips have displayed an interest in building devices based on their software. They will be offering the products as TeVo on steroids, TV timeshifting, EPG & recording, picture in picture in picture with an icon and various other blingy things, DVD ripping and storage (DRM supported using Suns DRM method), and also network awareness, uPnP media centre extender compatibility (or so i am led to believe), and millions of other things and they are providing this as a DVD player with integrated digital TV tuner and hard disk.
This is the first time I believe that gstreamer has been used in a media player and it was more than interesting to see it working, it is also the first time i believe that an end to end solution like this has been built on open source software (sky+ using linux and directfb I am told, with a custom UI).
Something that everyone interested should check out.
K,
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