Evas (Enlightenment canvas toolkit) is an extraordinary library and one of its awesome feature is being extremely fast to load and render objects, like pictures. As a result, that’s one of the reasons why we’ve choose it for Enna. But let’s see what can be done with it
You’ll find below an example of what Enna’s pictures viewer will look like in a few weeks. No need for you to grab latest development tree to do the same, it’s not yet committed. We’ve tried to think at the best and more natural way for one to browse within its photo collection and considered it was pretty useless to have them sorted by name (after all, they are all named DSCNxyz or whatever your camera save them …) and, more important, the following render just kicks ass, and that’s all that really matter. Hopefully, Nicolas Aguirre, Enna’s creator, master Evas like no one does. Lets just see what he can do:
Isn’t that just beautiful ? One can scroll between the various using the arrow keys or mouse and the whole directory is rendered as a large single wall of pictures that you can horizontally slide on (and pretty fast and smoothly). Alos, for the record, the display was generated from a 120 MB directory of pictures and it was loaded in a second. Pretty fast, huh ?
Let’s conclude with this picture wall dream with a real time video preview (though video capture is too slow to show you the image viewer smoothness).
The whole thing is just a mockup right now but is soon to be included within Enna. Of course, it also lacks of a few things like fullscreen display of the selected picture and, why not even add the possibility to display a panel with picture’s EXIF info or description ?
Extensive work has been commited to Enna’s development tree over the last few weeks. Many bugs have been fixed (though many still remain) and a few more modules have been added. Enna reached a point where the basic features (photo display and local audio/video files playback) are fullfilled.
Let’s start with the photo module. As you can see on the picture below, you’re now able to browse your directories to display all of your favorites pictures. Enna will give you a dropdown list of supported pictures files (PNG, JPEG, TIFF …) featuring both a thumbnail and the file’s name. Clicking on one of those pictures starts the slideshow feature which has some kick-ass transition effects.
Most improvements have been performed over the video module. First, it is now able to handle video files and play them back, thanks to libplayer backend. You may want to see Mat’s blog for latest info on libplayer but Enna is now capable creating an X11/XV child window where the movie can be displayed. Most of the work has been done however on the pre-loading movie screen. When you choose a movie to play, Enna uses its backends (emotion, libplayer) to retrieve the video properties and display them. As for the audio module, it can ask Amazon.com webservices to retrieve a cover for you. Most of the time however, your filename is not really Amazon compliant. Hence, if no cover can be found, Enna will simply uses backend to extract one frame from your movie and display it instead of a cover.
The retrieved covers are all stored to your HDD once downloaded, so that they are not retrieved again next time you’ll browse on that movie. Last but not least, a new module called “netstreams” has been added too. It is used to parse (and eventually download before) Extended M3U playlists (also .pls in the future) and let you access to their content. French users will be glad to know they can already play FreeboxTV through Enna
More news to come about Enna within the next weeks but it’ll mostly be bug fixing and interface changes for better usability.
Today’s news aims at introducing you to Enna Media Center. Enna is a software originally designed and created by Nicolas Aguirre. It consists of a nice UI based around Enlightenment E17 librairies (Evas, Ecore …) and will be part of the latter one the time has come. Its purpose is to implement all the necessary features to act as a Media Center. The E libs are a very fast and powerful canvas framework that runs on multiple platforms, both using framebuffer and Xserver/OpenGL video output.
Although the project is quite young and not mature, it has been chosen to be GeeXboX v2.x user interface. I know, the oldest fanboys already heard that so many times … There used to be MPUI, an MPlayer based UI, then came OMC (Open Media Center) which already was based on E17, and then came the Freevo thing (both SDL and E17 based) but which was overbloated and nearly not cross-compilable due to Python writing. But this time it’s for real, Enna will be GeeXboX’s future. The best proof is that Enna is now hosted on geexbox.org server instead of sourceforge.net.
If you wanna have a try to Enna and get invovled with development, you can safely grab the sources using Mercurial, as for any other GeeXboX project:
hg clone http://hg.geexbox.org/enna
As previsouly explained, Enna is still quite young and thus lacks of many features. Though, basic ones are already implemented and we have a minimalistic audio/video player interface as you can see on screenshots below:
Once configuration file has been set, it is already possible to browse your local disks content. A “library” module is already included using the Light Media Scanner project that builds a database of all your medias to be sorted by type, album name, band name and so on … Part of a SHOUTcast module also has been written but it can only list WebRadios right now (no playback). Next screen shows you audio playback. As you can see, it has cover display support (whether they are local image files or grabbed from Amazon.com) and ID3 tags retrieval feature.
