Elisa, a media center on the desktop

Speaker: Olivier Tilloy

About Elisa Elisa is a media center project primarily targeted at end users. It is built upon solid foundations such as gstreamer for media playback and pigment forbuilding efficient and cool UIs. It strives to put the media at the center of the user experience: let the user enjoy his/her media without getting in the way, while providing an immersive experience. One of its important goals, together with taking over your living room, is to achieve a good presence on, and integration with, the desktop.

History and evolution Since the first release of Elisa and its first presentation at GUADEC (in 2006), a tremendous amount of work has been done and most of the core elements are in place to allow Fluendo embedded and the community build a really cool media center.

Outlook Two big challenges are currently on the table: on one hand, find new, original ways of navigating and aggregating media, making full use of contextual services, and on the other hand, present this media to the user in a beautiful and immersive UI. Most of the efforts currently put in development are revolving around those themes.

Plans for the future Elisa has a lot to borrow from the desktop stack and a lot to give back in terms of user experience. Plans for the future include more UI experimentations, a full integration with social network services, and a stronger plugin engine that will allow creative contributors to improve and extend Elisa very easily.