Elisa

Introduction
This tutorial talks you through installing the Elisa Media Center. I've based this on my own personal experience of installing Elisa. It is by no means complete but I will update this page as I continue to tweak my own installation.

Installing the overlay
At time of writing dang's overlay was not in layman, so the first step is to install it manually. If you haven't got any overlays installed already you'll first need to create a /usr/portage/local directory:

$ su root $ mkdir /usr/portage/local

If you haven't installed subversion you need to install it now, in the usual way:

$ emerge subversion

Now to install dang's overlay:

$ cd /usr/portage/local $ svn co http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/dev/dang/maintainer

To tell portage about it you need to edit your /etc/make.conf and add the following line:

Finally make sure your portage is up to date using.

Installing Elisa
Browsing folders doesn't currently seem to work with dev-python/twisted later than 2.5 so open /etc/portage/package.mask and add this to the bottom:

Now try and install Elisa by. If this works for you, great, go on to Configuration. If not you may find you hit the same issue I did. The first dependency portage installed was. This compiled fine, but wouldn't install due to a sandbox access violation. If your emerge dies with an error that looks like this:

>>> Source compiled. --- ACCESS VIOLATION SUMMARY --- LOG FILE = "/var/log/sandbox/sandbox-24312.log" open_wr:  /root/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.x86_64.xml.tmp669IDU open_wr:  /root/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.x86_64.xml.tmpV19IDU

you've got the same issue I had. To get past the sandbox access violation errors you need to disable sandbox for pigment:

$ FEATURES="-sandbox" emerge pigment

Now you can run.

Database Backend
If you install sqlite, elisa will automatically pick this up and build a database of the media you've given it the location of:.

Installing Extra Plugins
This is a list of plugins that you can install to add extra functionality:

media-libs/gst-plugins-base media-libs/gst-plugins-good media-libs/gst-plugins-ugly media-plugins/gst-plugins-a52dec media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa media-plugins/gst-plugins-dvdread media-plugins/gst-plugins-faac media-plugins/gst-plugins-faad media-plugins/gst-plugins-ffmpeg media-plugins/gst-plugins-flac media-plugins/gst-plugins-fluendo-mpegdemux media-plugins/gst-plugins-gnomevfs media-plugins/gst-plugins-jpeg media-plugins/gst-plugins-lame media-plugins/gst-plugins-libpng media-plugins/gst-plugins-libvisual media-plugins/gst-plugins-mad media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpeg2dec media-plugins/gst-plugins-ogg media-plugins/gst-plugins-theora media-plugins/gst-plugins-vorbis media-plugins/gst-plugins-xvideo dev-python/PythonDaap

a lot of these will be installed already if you're using gnome, just run to find out which ones you haven't got.

Configuration
Run elisa from the menu to generate a ~/.elisa/elisa.conf, then hit esc to quit. Open up the file it's just created for you and add in the locations your media is stored in. Look for a section that looks like this:

and add your locations like so:

If you want to configure where these appear in the menu you'll need some extra sections. Like this:

According to Chandran Pitta of Google, who blogs about it here (http://chandan-pitta.blogspot.com/2008/05/elisa-problems-marshalling-mediauri.html) there is a bug that causes the elisa.conf file NOT to play your media files. This can be FIXED! :-)

The short version If you are having problems with elisa not playing your local media files (see https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/957 and https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/961)

Locate the snippet of text in the elisa.conf file like so:

fix it by editing and changing:

gstreamer:gst_metadata_client

...to:

gstreamer:gst_metadata.

...That is all and it works!

Elisa should now know about your local media. You can make it do a helluva lot more than this, have a look at http://elisa.fluendo.com/documentation for more info.