The GeeXboX project has announced the first stable release of Enna (version 0.4.0), an open source media center application. It features a simple user interface, based on the Enlightenment Foundations Libraries for its graphical user interface and the GeeXboX libraries for multimedia playback (libplayer) and information retrieval (libvalhalla and libnfo).
It allows the user to browse and play music and video files, browse pictures and play photo slideshows, retrieve information about media files from the Internet (such as covers, fan art, song lyrics, and much more) and build an indexed database of available media.
A press release and screenshots are available. Enna can be downloaded in source format; prebuilt packages for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic are also available. Enna will be the user interface of the upcoming GeeXboX 2.0 media center Linux distribution.
Over the past few years, I’ve become an avid user and tester of various media centre interfaces, and while I think Windows Media Center receives the polish award, the various XBMC variants (and XBMC itself, of course) definitely deserve the feature and flexibility awards.
I did a quick test of Enna on Ubuntu 9.10, and it indeed looks very good, and barely consumes any system resources. It’s still quite limited in configuration, obviously, as it’s all so new, so it won’t draw me away from Boxee for the foreseeable future. It is a very interesting project though, if only because it uses the EFL.
Definitely one to watch, and it’s easy to give it a shot on Ubuntu.
Any hope of live TV-tuner-over-network streaming under Linux so I can rid myself of MythTV?
MythTV gets my worst-application-I-can’t-live-without (when it actually works) award…
I would prefer seeing this a replacement to mythfrontend. MythTV is great as a server, but the frontend is not that good.
XBMC can be a mythfrontend, but it lack too much feature and sometime keep data for itself instead of sending them back the mythbackend.
My personal experience is that I need to restart the MythTV backend on a daily basis. And it is ludicrously complicated. Mysql?? – tv listings really aren’t industrial database worthy.
MythTV may be a good experience installed as a dedicated Mythbuntu operating system, but I’m not willing to take that drastic step.
I haven’t had a stable installation of MythTV since 2003. In fact most of those years I was unable to get a working installation at all, despite trying..and trying..and trying..
I installed a dedicated mythbuntu server talking to my other database server, used for Amarok and some other apps that offer that possibility to use external SQL server. Then the 5 frontend were less or more plug and play.
I did not experienced a backend crash since I installed it, few months ago. And it is not because I don’t use it, I do. I also like the iPod touch remote (mymote)
GeeXboX is a loooong way behind MythTV (and even XBMC/Boxee and Elisa/Moovida).
Personally – having played around with GeeXboX quite a bit last year – I’d only ever use it on a low powered machines that wouldn’t be left switched on (due it’s compactness and quick booting).
Windows Media Center 7 + Media Browser == super awesome.
Agree! That’s what I use, and it’s damned amazing.
I’m always amazed by the EFL: nicely designed, smooth and lightweight.
I just downloaded Enna and it looks really good, it’s still pretty rough but looks fairly promising. If they make it flexible and keep it simple, we mught have a winner. Maybe I should start investigating this media center thing…
Problem with the EFL is that they rewrote c++ using c and it’s ugly, very ugly. They should have used a very limited subset of c++ for it (classes & virtual functions).
“Problem with the EFL is that they rewrote c++ using c and it’s ugly, very ugly. They should have used a very limited subset of c++ for it (classes & virtual functions).”
hahaha, you’re funny. More people like you should write comments like that so that we can laugh. Life would be funnier.
seriously, open *and read* a good book of C++. It seems that you don’t know much about C++. And maybe even C.
Why is it funny?
He almost certainly has, which explains his reaction to the EFL’s ‘object-simulation-in-a-non-oo-language’ approach.
It looks like EFL is doing the same thing that Glib (GObject) does (or it actually uses Glib underneath?), which is to try and simulate C++ style objects in C.
Now I wouldn’t call it ‘ugly’ myself (anytime you try and do something in a language that the language doesn’t support there will be issues), but it certainly is exceedingly verbose…
“It looks like EFL is doing the same thing that Glib (GObject) does (or it actually uses Glib underneath?), which is to try and simulate C++ style objects in C.”
You’re wrong. If you read the code of the EFL (Evas for example), it’s absolutely not the case.
The OO style of gobject, and of gtk, and of any OO style written in C, is just the way a structure is managed in memory : if you have a structure A which is the parent of the structure B, then B must be :
struct B
{
A a;
***
};
i.e. beginning by a variable of type A. That’s how it is done in any OO written in C.
In Evas, all the Evas objects are of type Evas_Object. There is 1 type, and, obviously, does not follow the same scheme that in in gobject of gtk. And obviously is not an OO library.
I have no experience at all with MediaCenter software, what would you recommend that’d be easy enough to setup and would also allow for DVR of TV programs? Wrt hardware, what graphic card would be the bare minimum for Full HD? Thanks in advance.
Rehdon
Enna is good with its interface, but it is not fully developed yet. The documentation does not tell how to configure it. The builtin configuration menu has nothing to do in it. I had to edit the config file manually to get it to see my pictures and TV Shows.
This is the problem of our current Open Source community. There are too many good programs, but not enough complete, well rounded programs.
As the previous commenters were saying, MythTV frontend is not that great or its backend needs to be restarted often, not 1 application is fully fixed. Developers just fork from its original and try to bring in their flavour rather than fix the original.
I used MythTV for couple of years and I got tired of it. So now if I need to record a show, I just use command line to dump the show to an mpeg file and view it using VLC.
If I need to see a live show, I have a wrapper which dumps the channel into an mpeg file and I use VLC to open up that file and watch it live. When I kill the vlc, the mpeg file is removed too. Of course I rarely have time to watch TV live now a days.
I hope this project gets all the bugs out and makes it very user friendly.
You can configure it with the ISO Generation tool:
http://geexbox.org/en/downloads.html
Unfortunately, this means you need to generate a new “live CD” for each configuration change.
Laurence: I believe you’re confusing GeeXboX with Enna. GeeXboX is a livecd linux distribution for mediacenters, while Enna is a mediacenter program (which you can install on your distro, and we provide packages for Ubuntu). Enna will be the new user interface of GeeXboX 2.0 (GeeXboX 1.x uses an mplayer menu as it’s user interface).
doctorwhofan10: we plan to write a proper configuration module that will not require you to edit enna.cfg by hand. Also, a TV module which will act as a frontend for VDR is in the works.
Davide (GeeXboX developer)
Edited 2010-01-05 16:18 UTC
I’d LOVE to hear more details or a dump of your wrapper solution.
Unless it supports CableCard (which it certainly does not), it’s a non-starter, because it can’t record anything but basic cable content, not encrypted premium content.