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.

For a general guide on overlays go here.

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:

  PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/portage/local/maintainer $PORTDIR_OVERLAY"

Finally make sure your portage is up to date using emerge --sync.

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:

  >dev-python/twisted-2.5.0
  >dev-python/twisted-web-2.5.0

Now try and install Elisa by emerge -av elisa. 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 media-libs/pigment. 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 emerge -av elisa.

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: emerge -av sqlite pysqlite.

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 emerge -s gst-plugins 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:

  [xmlmenu:locations_builder]
  locations = []
  auto_locations = 1

and add your locations like so:

  [xmlmenu:locations_builder]
  locations = ['file:///DivX/Film', 'file:///DivX/TV', 'file:///MP3/Music']
  auto_locations = 1

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

  [[file:///DivX/Film]]
  label = 'Movies'
  only_media = ['video']
  location_type = 'local'
  
  [[file:///DivX/TV]]
  label = 'TV'
  only_media = ['video']
  location_type = 'local'
  
  [[file:///MP3/Music]]
  label = 'Music'
  only_media = ['audio']
  location_type = 'local'

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. 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 configuration file and fix it by editing ~/.elisa/elisa.conf and changing:

gstreamer:gst_metadata_client 

to

gstreamer:gst_metadata. 

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.