[Umc-dev] Discussion agenda for UDS-Intrepid around the integration of Elisa media center

[Arnaud Quette]

Hi Alessandro, Florian, the UMC Team and u-devel,

I should have stepped up for long to announce this on the UMC mailing list.

I hereby resign of my position of UMC Team leader. Running a community
and such an effort requires more energy and time that I can give to
this specific task. And this project really needs someone dedicated to
run it and manage the many people willing to help.

Note that I'm already running an important community (Network UPS
Tools) and many related projects and packages, which requires my
attention. Moreover, real life has caught me in many ways.

This will allow me to give the tiny bit of time remaining to the
important task of improving LIRC (standardized key namespace and HAL
support), which will benefit back to UMC and other Media Center
solutions. I'm still unsure about the debs maintenance since I only
had time for coherence (thanks and sorry Lool)

A word about Elisa : this is the most promising MC solution out there!
kudos to the Fluendo team.
But though I'm persuaded that it's the solution for UMC in the long
run, it still lacks some feature completion. So some alpha development
or flavor of UMC can be done using MythBuntu (kudos there to Superm1,
along with the Dell job ;-), or XBMC.
I don't know the state of the current HH packages, but Fluendo should
still provide some working ones: http://elisa.fluendo.com/

A word about UMC: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMediaCenterTeam
A lot of work has already been achieved, based on Elisa, on the
specifications, development, artwork and packaging. Even some things
have been done on the liveCD creation. So the path isn't long to a
releasable solution to the public.

I'm obviously willing to help any people filling brave enough, and
having the right profile, to take over this charge. And I hope this
will be in time for UDS...
don't hesitate if you have questions, I'm still surfacing for a few days ;-)

2008/4/22, Alessandro Decina <alessandro.d at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
>  We would like to discuss the integration of a default media center solution
>  in the Ubuntu desktop at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Intrepid Ibex.
>
>  The goal is to give Ubuntu users an out of the box, easy to use,
>  well integrated and appealing multimedia application allowing them to enjoy
>  their multimedia content.
>
>  Competing desktops such as Mac OS/X provide their users with an
>  immediate solution
>  to browse their content and retrieve content from the Internet in a very visual,
>  intuitive and beautiful user interface. This is a fundamental part of
>  the end user
>  experience and makes a big difference in the overall feeling of the desktop.
>
>  Major key elements towards success are:
>  - giving users a both usable and very attractive user interface
>  - perfect integration with the user's desktop (cross-application
>  interoperability,
>   visual integration, etc.)
>  - it should work out of the box
>
>  Members of the Elisa media center team and of the Ubuntu media center team are
>  willing to attend the Ubuntu developer summit for the Intrepid Ibex in order to
>  gather around a specification. The basic idea is to take the Elisa media center
>  and make the necessary adaptation to fit all the use cases that will
>  be discussed.
>  Elisa has already an interesting UI and comes with an extensible framework
>  that would ease the task by an order of magnitude.
>
>  A specification has been created [1] and is in a drafting state at the
>  moment. Anyone
>  is welcome to participate.
>
>  An important and very practical point is that we would like to know who is
>  interested in discussing it at UDS-Intrepid and on what days so that we can book
>  plane tickets and so on.
>
>
>  Have a nice day,
>
>  Alessandro Decina
>  Florian Boucault
>
>  [1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/elisa-integration
>

cheers,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - MGE Office Protection Systems - http://www.mgeops.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/