Raiden's Realm: Review: Moovida Media Center

Review: Moovida Media Center (Page 1 of 1)

Written by SJR
Posted on: Dec 14, 2009 at 03:41pm
Section: Software
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Moovida, formerly called Elisa, is a cross-platform (Windows and Linux) media suite sponsored by Fluendo. The test installation used version 1.0.9. The program has promise, notably in its elegant design. But it faltered in some areas of performance, and could use some polishing.

Installing Moovida was a snap via Xubuntu's Add/Remove Software feature. It was automatically added to the application menu and launched smoothly. The program uses the Gstreamer framework, so its ability to play media out of the box may be limited by which multimedia codecs are already present on your machine.

Moovida is visually appealing, and was designed to be used on large displays. Pressing “ESC” toggles between windowed and full-screen modes. Trying Moovida in full-screen mode on both a desktop monitor and a large-screen LCD TV showed good results. On the monitor, the windowed view was too cramped and required excessive scrolling. Viewed from 2-4 meters back, sitting on a couch, the full-screen display on the LCD TV was crisp and easily readable.

Illustration 1: Moovida has a slick user interface

The home screen has vertical menus arranged horizontally across the screen, with on-screen scroll buttons to move between choices. The individual menus are Settings, Devices and Shares, Music, Movies, Pictures, TV Shows, Internet Media, and Plugins. Under each heading are submenus for specific functions.

Navigating the interface is easy; wringing good performance out of the program was harder. The program cataloged available audio, video and image files in a user-friendly way. Accessing and playing media from the PC's HDD was helped by the clearly organized interface and was handled competently. Playing media on other computers on a home network is possible, but opening the “Other computers” tab on the “Devices & Shares” menu produced a vague and ultimately unresolved UPNP error message. Note that there are also very few user-changeable options anywhere in the program.

Moovida correctly recognized audio and DVD discs, and launched a minimalistic player. Audio CD quality was good; the CD menu offered a “browse” option in addition to “play”, but pressing it had no effect. The DVD player opened with a splash screen warning that DVD playback is “experimental”. Sure enough, video playback was smooth but the picture quality was mediocre. The DVD menu was clear, but the actual video had prominent horizontal stripes when viewed on the LCD TV and the playback on the monitor was grainy.

DVD Video was unimpressive

Internet content displays through a dedicated plug-in for each source. The selection was eclectic, but some users will find it limited. Choices include Flickr, CNN, Shoutcast, last.fm, You Tube, deviantART (for images) and various, mostly French-language, European TV and radio channels. The Shoutcast plugin crashed shortly after launching, but You Tube videos and most audio and internet radio sources were clear. HD trailers from the Apple website were very clear – horrifyingly so for the “Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakwel”. Choices for many of the videos are limited to pre-selected clips.

Jack Black HD Trailer for Brutal Legend

One persistent problem stemmed from the minimalist design. There were long lags in opening some plug-ins or responding to user input, but often there is no consistent on-screen indicator of what the program is doing. This led to an odd result during the first test. Random clicking on various menu buttons appeared to produce no reaction at first, only to be followed a few seconds later by Moovida blasting into life as it caught up from the lag and started to flip back and forth between streaming Zenradio FM “Relaxation Meditation” and “Eagles of Death Metal” on Kink FM, interspersed with moments of silence. The effect was jarring, but funny.

The player interface is severely minimal

The test system ran Xubuntu 9.10 on an Athlon XP 2800+ CPU, Nvidia Nforce 3 250Gb chipset, Radeon 9550 AGP video, 1GB RAM, and a 160GB IDE HDD. At system idle, with only the OS running, CPU use was 5-10%, with 220MB of RAM used. During DVD playback, CPU use was 50-75%; Moovida took up another 372MB of RAM, for a total of 592MB.

If you've got the RAM, Moovida's got video from The Onion

Overall, Moovida is a good choice for users looking for visual polish and eclectic on-line content or who want to browse locally-stored media collections -- and who don't mind glitches or want to customize the look, feel or performance of the software. The design of the user interface is polished, and makes the stand-alone media apps in most Linux distros look primitive. The “works out of the box” quotient was moderate. What worked, like creating libraries of locally-stored media and some of the internet content options, worked well. The areas that didn't work, like accessing share drives, often left few or cryptic clues as to why they weren't working. The program is promising, but needs more work before it's up to the standards of the best of breed in other OS's.

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