I’m not sure if too many people know about Elisa, quite frankly it is quite amazing that something as wonderful as Elisa is not in the limelight(as yet!). For a quick and brief introduction, Elisa is a sleek next generation media center where you can watch videos, browse pictures, manage music etc.
Read ahead for a quick list of features:
MUSIC:
Elisa finds music and arranges it by artist, by album and by folder. It includes all the album art to give you a very interesting interface to play with. Elisa has been designed in a extensible manner by which adding plugins can enhance features. It currently bundles the shoutcast radio plugin.
VIDEOS:
Elisa arranges videos and allows you to play them. It also has a youtube plugin that can be used to browse youtube videos!
PICTURES:
Elisa finds pictures from the default folders. The picasa extension allows you to browse pictures uploaded to your web album.
All locations that Elisa can look into can be defined in home/~user~/.elisa/elisa.conf. Whats better is that the file locations, network urls, anything!
Elisa works on both Windows and Linux, though on Windows its still an alpha release.
Some tips to install Elisa on Ubuntu:
Elisa is packaged with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) To install and get it working properly with all plugins do:
$ sudo apt-get install elisa
$ sudo apt-get install elisa-plugins-bad elisa-plugins-ugly
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-*
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
$ elisa
Here’s a link to install Elisa on earlier versions of Ubuntu: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766012
Curiouser and curiouser! 
Just tried it. It’s awesome! It’s even lighter than the MSWin media center on my sluggish old box.
yeah! It works like a charm