A few months ago at work we had our Sony NSP-1 hard drive crash. It is basically a media player that we hooked up to a projector to show off media about Distance Education. We called up Sony to see about a replacement hard drive or to send the unit in to get fixed. Sony says they will not support it. The Sony box was running Linux on it in the first place, but was very limited by the media formats it would play. I decided to just get an old computer we had and load Ubuntu on it. While I was searching for a good media player to show the media files I stumbled upon Elisa. Elisa is a media player that works just like Apple Front Row. It even has support for Windows Media infared remotes. It also supports a lot more video formats than what the Sony device did. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is a way for it to repeat all the movies in a folder. It is possible the feature isn’t implemented yet. I am going to post about it on their message board and see what I can find out. Here is a clip of the interface in action: