Open Source Media Center

Open source media center for Windows
Why buy a Media Center PC when you can make your own - fun project for an old PC "Media Portal turns your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. It allows you to listen to your favorite music, radio, watch your video's and DVD's, view, schedule and record live TV and much more. You get Media Portal for free/nothing/nada/nopes and best of all it is open source. This means anyone can help developing Media Portal or tweak it for their own needs.
Elish Media center
Elisa is a project to create an open source cross platform media center solution. While our primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems we also currently support Microsoft Windows and also hope to support MacOSX in the future. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework. In addition to personal video recorder functionality (PVR) and Music Jukebox support, Elisa will also interoperate with devices following the DLNA standard like Intel's ViiV systems. The Elisa team is proud to announce 0.0.1 release of the core of the Elisa home multimedia system. The 0.0.x series is aimed at developers and early adopters with later releases targeting the wider user community. This particular release is mainly a technology preview aimed to show the current features and user interfaces of Elisa to enable us to get early feedback and input from the wider community.
Open Source Media center project
CenterStage is the Media Center Application that allows you to use the digital content stored on your Apple Macintosh computer & play it in a more comfortable enviroment such as your living room using any standard Televison set. CenterStage is a open source application, if you are interested in the technical side or contributing to the project. We are just compiling the release notes and download package for CenterStage 0.6, this means it will be released in the next couple of days.
Via Tunes Open-Source Media Player
Via Technologies has released a version of the open-source Xine media player that is designed to take advantage of hardware digital video acceleration capabilities in two of the company's PC chipsets, the CN400 and CLE266. The Via-enhanced Xine Player version 3.0 (VeXP 3.0) was developed for Linux-based personal electronics devices that rely on the MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 acceleration functions of the Via chipsets, company representatives say. VeXP 3.0 can reduce a processor's workload by more than 50 percent when using the video acceleration capabilities of the CN400 and CLE266 chipsets, according to Via. The player supports a range of video formats, including DVD.
Elisa, an open-source Media-Center in Python
Elisa is an open-source Media-Center developed in Python, moreover it heavily relies on the Gstreamer multimedia framework and uses OpenGL API so as to take full advantage of nowadays graphical hardware. It's designed to be easy to extend using a plugins system. Packaging and deployment are managed by Python Eggs. Elisa is funded by Fluendo, there are currently two developers working full-time on the project. We plan to release the first version of the software very soon, including a set of basic features :
* pictures browsing
* movies and music playback
* web-radios support
* dvd playback
Open Source Media Center Front-end
TVedia's front-end is deliberately designed to use XML+JavaScript (similar to HTML+JavaScript) for development. The use of JavaScript doesn't make TVedia's front-end slow, because the heavy lifting of batch data processing and binding are performed by back-end engines, which are highly optimized to handle very large datasets, high definition video files, and high resolution photos. However, by using XML+JavaScript, we have opened up the front-end development to everyone who can read/write JavaScript, which is a much larger pool than people who can write C/C++ or C#. At the same time, the front-end JavaScript is not scrambled, which means the source code is available for users to examine and modify. Further more, the architecture allows for incremental changes to be applied on top of existing front-end, through the use of an XML skin schema that supports delta changes, and taking advantage of JavaScript's built-in object oriented constructs, so a new TVedia release won't wipe out changes users have made, and the change can likely still work with the new release, as long as there is no structural changes to the pages being modified.
The Open Source media center
MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help develop MediaPortal or tweak-it for your own needs whith lots of innovating plugins from our great community. Features
Appearance - Customize the look with one of the available skins or create your own.
Extensible - Easily extend the functionality in MediaPortal with plug-ins.
Input Devices - Core support for various input devices such as remotes and IR devices.
Customization - Custom configuration over many aspects of the program.
Localization - MediaPortal can be easily localized to your regional language using the many languages available or by creating a new language file.
Making Open Source Play Nice In The Data Center
Now that Linux and a variety of open-source applications have reached a high level of credibility among some business-technology managers for use in data-center environments, vendors of open-source products are trying to convince more IT shops to give serious consideration to implementing open-source technology. The latest moves came Tuesday when Novell pledged in separate announcements to certify a number of software applications running in high-performance computing environments on Hewlett-Packard servers and to offer technical support for users of JBoss Inc.'s Enterprise Middleware System. Novell now offers a high-performance computing option as part of the company's Validated Configuration Program, which the company unveiled in March. When companies in the electronic-design-automation, financial-
services, life-sciences, manufacturing, and oil and gas markets are looking for a highly tuned package of high-performance operating system, server, and applications, Novell and HP want Linux on x86-based blade servers to be a no-brainer.