New release of Elisa out

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The Elisa team did a new release yesterday, 0.1.3. The big news in this release is initial support for being a upnp server. We have some support for being a upnp client for a long while, but thanks to Coherence we are now able to support being a server also. Be sure to grab this release and report back and issues to the Elisa team. Full release notes for Elisa 0.1.3 to be found here on the Elisa homepage.

16 thoughts on “New release of Elisa out”

  1. Hey, dude- are there any desktop linux upnp clients? Or to put it another way: if I installed Elisa on my media PC, what would the upnp stuff allow it to talk to? Anything yet? Intel demos only? :) 770? Something else? If there isn’t much support yet, what are the use cases upnp is going to help solve?

    (I’m in the middle of writing a blog post about Elisa/media pcs, distros, upnp-like stuff, etc., so the timing of this is really good :)

  2. Not a bad start! My biggest complaint right now is that trying to find a single move in a folder that contains 50 of them is extremely painful when you can only see the title of one at a time and none of them have thumbnails. It looks promising though.

  3. Elisa is compliant with the UPnP A/V specs set. It means that if there’s a MediaServer on your network (like a NAS, an XBox MediaCenter extender, a MythTV backend :), etc) it will magically appear in Elisa and you’ll be able to browse/play remote medias like they were local.

    This new Elisa release brings a new plugin, the UPnP server which allows MediaRenderers on your network (like a UPnP compliant TV, the Nokia770) to play medias known by Elisa and its local database.

    @segphault: yes this is critical known issue of the skin, we are still working on ergonomy/UI improvements to solve this annoying behaviour of the skin.

  4. I see.. and what makes you believe the Elisa team did a new release yesterday, 0.1.3?

  5. Phillipe: thanks for the details. In my case the Media Server and the UPnP ‘TV’ would be one and the same; but it sounds like 770 + Canola could be used to control that TV? Or am I not getting it right? [Though the idea of splitting up storage and display would be appealing if UPnP made it easy.]

  6. Where is DVR functionality on the Elisa roadmap? I’ve gotten MythTV going before, but lordy it’s *painful* to work with. When will Elisa ease my pain?

  7. Luis: strangely enough very little desktop software supports uPnP at the moment. There are a long list of Media center solutions for Linux supporting it though in addition to Elisa.
    The Wikipedia UPnp
    page lists a lot of them. Hopefully we can get some support into Rhythmbox and Banshee soon.

    Outside Linux there is of course a lot of support, including a lot of hardware, including TV’s with Upnp A/V support.

  8. Jensck,

    The DVR features have been on our roadmap since a while now but hasn’t been already scheduled. We first work on stabilizing the current features and make our best to provide rock-solid Elisa release.

    The Elisa core team recently grew up, we are now 3 full-time developers working on the project. A freelance developer is also working 3 days per week on the project.. So expect things to move faster from now on :)

  9. jensck: it is very high on the Elisa roadmap. Its currently waiting for some work being done in the core, but as soon as that is done the GUI will hook in PVR functionality.

  10. Hrm… so I can have multiple media centers (one Elisa, one something else) talking to each other? I feel like I’m missing something obvious- that doesn’t seem very useful to me.

    (And any answers re: Canola + Elisa? Does that combo do anything useful/interesting?)

  11. AFAIK Canola can act as a MediaRenderer, meaning that it should be able to play Elisa’s shared medias. I think Canola can also act as a MediaServer so the contrary should also be possible.

    But Canola only runs on N770 and I haven’t seen any source release yet (only deb binaries), we can doubt it will be open-source soon.

  12. Luis, the advantage is the fact that it goes across various devices and systems so in your home you don’t need to copy your files around between different systems across the house.
    Take a look at the DLNA product list and you find a lot of different kind of devices which will automatically interoperate due to supporting this standard. The DLNA standard also takes it further than plain uPnP A/V as it offers on-the-fly transcoding in case your client device only supports the minimal set of codecs. This means that if you have some files that for instance the 770/800 do not support on your media center you will stillb be able to listen to them through your device as the media center server transcodes them to supported mp3 on the fly as it streams the songs over.

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