Elisa and Dirac news

Posted on by

Thought I share some of the latest newsbits on Elisa our media center solution. Philippe and Loic are hard at work with the reworking of Elisa internals, which hopefully will be mostly done by the end of next week. Once that is done we have a much stronger fundation for going forward and can go back into ‘feature add’ mode. Two features which we hope to get added in the coming month(s) is full uPnP support and DVB support.

There already is limited client uPnP support in current Elisa, but thanks to the work Frank Scholz is doing on creating a python uPnP framework called Coherence (sorry no URL yet) it should be much easier for us to take the upnp support to the next step to make Elisa a full server and control point for upnp/viiv services. One nice thing that this will enable is integration with Media Streamer which is a upnp enabled player/controller for the Nokia 770. My hope is that you would eventually be able to use your 770 as a media center control pad for your home with Elisa as the heart.

In regards to DVB most of the GStreamer related work is done now and in GStreamer CVS. What we know need is some way to scan whats available through DVB and then hook everything up with a GUI in Elisa.
I hope to be able to throw out my DVB decoder box at home and replace it by a system with a DVB card and running Elisa before new years.

Another cool Elisa newsitem is the Flickr plugin that Michael Sheldon did. As Elisa matures I hope we have a huge number of such plugins available enabling people to easily pick and choose the plugins they want to create the media center system of their dreams.

Dirac stuff

David Schleef is doing some great work currently on Schroedinger. With latest CVS of Schroedinger and liboil I am able to transcode files to Dirac in Ogg using this pipeline:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=320-256kbits-NVIDIA-MadModMike.wmv ! fluasfdemux ! fluwmvdec ! ffmpegcolorspace ! schroenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=dirac-in-ogg.ogg

And play it back again with gst-launch and playbin. Still eating a lot of CPU which David is trying to figure out how we can reduce even if the arithmetic decoding seems like a though nut to optimize. Getting some strange error in Totem, but we will hopefully be able to resolve that soon.

I am also able to create MPEG Transport Stream files with Dirac inside using our Transport Stream muxer that we developed with BBC R&D. We are working on some critical deadlines currently making time a lacking resource, but hopefully things will cool down a bit next week and we can take the time to move it into the public SVN and make a proper release for the public.

6 thoughts on “Elisa and Dirac news”

  1. Thank you very much for the update — I’m very interested in the progress of Dirac and Schroedinger in particular.

    Just a quick question about that pipeline you’re using though — how come you’re using flutsmux as the multiplexer rather than standard oggmux?

    Also, is fluwmvdec likely to get a public release any time soon? ;)

  2. I just want to say thanks for this and the other updates you’ve been writing recently. I think many people are always interested to hear about the status of the various gstreamer related projects.

  4. Tristan, thanks for pointing out the mistake in the pipeline posted :) The flutsmux muxer is the MPEG Transport stream muxer I mentioned so the pipeline was not correct (for creating an Ogg file at least :). I updated the entry to say oggmux now instead.

  5. Hi, thanks for doing these status updates.

    A short update on what’s going on with PiTiVi would be very appreciated, as there seems to be very little activity on the lists.

Comments are closed.