Elisa : All in One Media Center

The Elisa Media Center has many advanced features that will make your media center experience unique. It features an intuitive interface with a professional look and feel which can be easily used with a standard TV remote control.

Elisa is an open source media center connecting the Internet to an all-in-one media player. The Elisa Media Center has many advanced features that will make your media center experience unique. It features an intuitive interface with a professional look and feel which can be easily used with a standard TV remote control.

On the DVD : 3D OS Standard + Warnet Edition
Menu : Start > Multimedia > Elisa Media Center

Features:

• Movies - Watch your own movies and video clips as well as those found online.
• Music - Manage your music collection by artists or album covers.
• Peripheral Devices - Automatically detects iPods, cameras, hard drives, etc…
• Pictures - Watch your pictures with previews and nicely animated slideshows.
• Fully Networked - Elisa automatically finds media from other computers on your local network.
• Internet - Everything from Flickr to Youtube and other popular internet services.

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Geexbox - Media Center

GeeXboX is a full operating system, running under Linux and based on the excellent MPlayer. No need for a hard drive, you just have to put the GeeXboX bootable CD into the CD-Drive of any Pentium-class or Apple Macintosh computer to boot it. Moreover, GeeXboX is free software, created as open-source software. This means that everyone can modify it and build his own release of the GeeXboX.



You may wonder why you should have to boot another operating system to play your media files, but just think about the Mini-ITX platforms like VIA Epia/Eden or Shuttle barebones. It's now affordable to bring DivX to your home cinema, plugging this kind of computer directly to your TV !!

At the time of the first development releases (Dec. 2002), it was only capable of playing DivX movies, but now, nearly every kind of media file can be played with GeeXboX, with the OS supporting :

* MPEG 1/2 movies (MPG files, VCDs, DVDs ...)
* MPEG 4 movies (DivX, XviD, H.264 ...)
* RealMedia and Windows Media movies.
* OggMedia streams
* Matroska streams
* Audio streams like : MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, WAV (AudioCD), AC3, DTS, MusePack (MPC), FLAC ...
* Network streams : WebRadio and WebTV through SHOUTcast.
* Watching analog TV and digital DVB
* Playing analog Radio streams.
* Playing files from your local network (LAN) through remote NFS, Samba (i.e. Windows) or UPnP shares.
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Freevo - Media Center

Imagine a world where the tv guide is liquid, where the time slots are organised to suit your schedule. Imagine a place you can store all of your music, movies and photos for you and your family to enjoy. Imagine having access to all your games, podcasts, upto the minute weather and news reports. Imagine doing all of this for free. What a wonderful world that would be...
Stop imagining, GET FREEVO!

Freevo allows you to manage your entire digital media collection - music, videos, photos etc. via a remote controlled TV interface and through the built in web interface you can also access your media, view your TV guide and schedule recordings from anywhere in the world. The benefit of freevo above other HTPC solutions is that freevo is 100% DRM free, plays video in 99.99% of formats, and most of all puts you in control of the television.

As an open-source home theatre PC platform, Freevo employs a number of open-source audio/video tools, MPlayer and/or Xine are used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone HTPC computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer or laptop using the monitor and keyboard.

Main features

• Cross platform - runs on Linux, OSX and Windows (sort of ;) )^*8
• Watch & record television
• Pause live TV - DVB and analogue (with ivtv card)
• Support for multiple tuners - watch and record simultaneously.
• Separate recording server allows multiple backends and frontends on your network.
• Commercial detection/removal
• Play & backup^*1 DVD video
• Play any kind of file supported by mplayer/xine/ffmpeg including DIVX & MPEG4
• Watch the latest movie trailers^*2
• Retrieve video covers & information^*3
• Play & backup audio CDs and retrieve album track lists^*4 & covers^*5
• Play MP3/Wav/Ogg/Flac or any other audio supported by mplayer or xine
• Tune into Internet radio from around the world
• Read news headlines^*6 and the weather
• View and import images from a digital camera
• Play games^*7
• Control home automation equipment (lights, sockets etc.)

1. Requires encoding server plugin
2. Using the appletrailers plugin
3. Using the Internet movie database
4. Using the Free Internet CD database
5. Using Amazon web services
6. Using RSS technology
7. Includes Linux games, PSone, NES/SNES, Megadrive, Dreamcast, Mame and many more
8. Windows support is limited at the moment but Freevo is written in python so if you are a developer with Windows and python experience please join in and help. An email to the devel list would be the place to start. For a quick start you can just download Microsoft's Virtual PC and load up a Freevo Live CD on that!

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Entertainer - Media Center

Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution for the Gnome and XFce desktop environments. Entertainer is written completely in Python using an object-oriented programming philosophy. It uses GStreamer's multimedia framework for multimedia playback.

Entertainer user interface is implemented with the Clutter library, which allows sleek OpenGL animated user interfaces. Entertainer also uses other great projects like SQLite, pyIMDBb and iNotify.

The ultimate goal of this project is to create the best media center solution available for any platform. This means that Entertainer should be the best looking, most easy to use and most feature filled media center solution available. Not the easiest goal to achieve but we are working on it.
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XBMC - Media Center

XBMC is an award winning media center application for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox. The ultimate hub for all your media, XBMC is easy to use, looks slick, and has a large helpful community.


Media Management

XBMC supports viewing and playing a vast library of audio, video and image formats. XBMC has a sophisticated library management system that allows you to organize all your media to give you quick and immediate access.

Fluid Interface
XBMC provides a user friendly interface that's intuitive, very flexible, and easy to use. The interface is completely customizable through user-created or downloadable skins.

Plug-ins and Extensibility
XBMC has a built-in Python interpreter that allows users and developers to write their own scripts and plugins that run inside XBMC using it's own widgets and controls. It also has a built-in web server that allows it to be controlled remotely.

Visualisations
XBMC's audio player supports many visualisations including ProjectM and Goom. In addition, it allows easy development of visualisations using a simple API.
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Myth TV - Media Center

MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems. MythTV is known to work on Linux and Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It does not run on Windows.

MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:

* You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television.
* You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time.
* You can have multiple servers (called "backends"), each with multiple capture cards in them. All scheduling is performed by the Master backend, which arbitrates which recording will be performed by each device. All recording requests are managed by the Master backend, so you can schedule a recording from any client.
* You can have multiple clients (called "frontends" in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control.
* You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems.
* Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from schedulesdirect.org, a non-profit organization which has licensed data from Tribune Media Services. This service provides almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don't have enough tuners.
* MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system.

Other modules in MythTV include:

* MythArchive, a tool to create DVDs
* MythBrowser, a web browser
* MythControls, an application to configure your remote control
* MythFlix, a Netflix module
* MythGallery, a picture-viewing application
* MythGame
* MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC
* MythNews, a RSS news grabber
* MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP.
* MythVideo, DVD ripper and a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV
* MythWeather
* MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser. With MythWeb, you can schedule and delete recordings, change keybindings and more. With proper security, you may even schedule a program over the Internet and have it immediately acted on by the Master backend.

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