I’ve been thinking for a while on the right tool to create a media centre for home: today I’m giving a try to ELISA.
It is quite a mature all-media player which is written in python and based on gstreamer

However, due to problems in plugins code review, the official Fedora 10 repositories still lags to version 0.3. See “Elisa doesn’t start” and “Update ELISA” from bugzilla.

It is possible to install it on Fedora 9 following this instruction.  For Fedora 10 you’ll find that the repository has moved to

http://people.fluendo.com/matthias/elisa/

In order to install it I just:

  1. Downloaded elisa.repo from its original location and copied it to /etc/yum.repos.d
  2. Imported  http://freshrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms
  3. Installed “elisa” from the graphical front end with all the related packages (plugins-good,bad and ugly)

After installation it crashed with the error:

Elisa failed to initialize: [Failure instance: Traceback: <type ‘exceptions.ImportError’>:
No module named cssutils

Installing package python-cssutils make it working for me. After looking at the Internet section, I tried to play the latest Apple Movie trailers directly from the program interface. But ELISA complained it could not find any MPEG4 or H.264 decoder.

Being gstreamer based, I thought that simply installing all gstreamer-plugins (again, good,ugly and bed plus some other) would solve the problem but… nope, still no H.264 video.

I eventually installed PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin and fired up Totem to see if it could play one of the trailer from Apple: it magically detected the missing plugin and asked me to install gstreamer ffmpeg.
Now everything is working like a charm!

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