Xine Video Player

[Benita Vandervoort]

xineˈksiːn/[2] is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries from other projects such as liba52, libmpeg2, FFmpeg, libmad, FAAD2, and Ogle.[3] xine can also use binary Windows codecs through a wrapper, bundled as the w32codecs, for playback of some media formats that are not handled natively.[1]

xine was started in 2000 by Gnter Bartsch shortly after LinuxTag. At that time playing DVDs in Linux was described as a tortuous process since one had to manually create audio and video named pipes and start their separated decoder processes.

Gnter realized the OMS (Open Media System) or LiViD approach had obvious shortcomings in terms of audio and video synchronization, so xine was born as an experiment trying to get it right. The project evolved into a modern media player multi-threaded architecture.[4]

During xine development, some effort was dedicated to making a clear separation of the player engine (xine-lib) and front-end (xine-ui). Since the 1.0 release (2004-12-25) the API of xine-lib is considered stable and several applications and players rely on it.[citation needed]

Since it is not a member of DVD Forum, the xine project is not contractually obliged to insert user operation prohibition such as disallowing fast-forward or skipping during trailers and ads. However, without membership in the Forum, the project also cannot make xine play DVDs encrypted with CSS except by using reverse-engineered code. xine therefore uses the libdvdcss library, which was created by reverse engineering. The legal status of libdvdcss is questionable in several nations; in the United States, for example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably prohibits reverse-engineering of CSS. Virtually all commercial DVDs are encrypted with CSS.

To prevent a screensaver from starting, xine sends a scroll lock key signal to the environment to pretend keyboard interaction took place. This can often lead to issues with other programs running as they receive the scroll lock key as normal input. One example is the Konsole terminal emulator, which changes the behaviour of the arrow keys when scroll lock is used.[citation needed]

The shared library 'xine-lib' used and developed by xine is also used by other projects. For example, it can be used instead of GStreamer as a backend for the Phonon media framework used by KDE and Qt.

Meicel18.04.2007xine-lib 1.1.6A new xine-lib version is now available. This is mainly a bug-fix release; 1.1.5 has CD audio and DVD playback problems and a couple of X-related build problems. It also contains an updated Mac OS X video output plugin.

Old source repositories (hg.debian.org) are not anymore accessible. Sourceforge mirrors of main development repositories are still in use. All historical repositories were archived to alioth-archive.debian.org.

Changes include new video single step feature, keyframe index and x32 support. Optimizations in xine engine core functionality, resulting in ex. faster seeking and smaller CPU usage. Small fixes and optimizations all around the codebase.

Xine is a very popular multimedia player for Linux. Above all, it's a movie player, but it also can play audio files or connect to live streams. DVB cards can be accessed using the DVB input plugin. The main advantage of Xine over other DVB clients is that it can be completely controlled using a mouse. Many users like it because it provides much functionality for watching TV very easily.

Install the package

Instructions on doing so will vary by distribution. For example, with Debian GNU/Linux and Debian-derived distributions (such as Ubuntu), one can install from the GNOME desktop using Synaptic or from the command-line with one of these commands:

You should now see the first channel on your channels.conf list. If you want to always load the first channel on the list at startup, edit the following lines of the config file under /home/username/.xine/ :

You can use the mouse scroll wheel to change channels. Once a channel has been tuned Xine will display EIT data (the current program) next to the channel. To record, use "Menu 2" from the popup menu, or select "Menu 2" from the navigation panel (keyboard shortcut: ALT+e). To view EPG data select "Menu 7".

Methods of changing channel other than the previous/next keys will cause a channel list to be displayed; this will display some now/next information, depending on what's been received on the current multiplex and any previously visited (this information is not remembered when you quit xine).

Hi all. I do not know if it is my first HEVC video file ever, but I am not able to smoothly playback my file. On each player (VLC/Xine/Mplayer), the playback is very choppy and the debug output indicates that frames are being dropped. Given that all players are affected, it was wondering if a) something was wrong with my multimedia libs (TW, VLC repo and Packman repo for the rest) or b) my computer has become too old to play H265 (Lenovo SL500: Dual core 1.66 GHz, 6GB RAM, Intel graphics GMA 4500M).

Unfortunately, I have to use the official VLC repo because the Packman packages are affected by a Qt bug at the moment (see this). I know that this situation is not ideal and I will test-wise deactivate the VLC repo to check the consistency with Packman-only multimedia libs.

you probably used a messed up mplayer build, some messed up content, or one of these filters was messed up. I personally never had problems with mplayer deinterlacers. The only deinterlacer that can crash from time to time is mcdeint - motion compensation deinterlacer. Due to it using some code of the experimental Snow codec developed by Michael Niedermayer/Loren Merritt (x264 dev/maintainer) for its iterative searches, it can badly crash if you use it with values > 0 (eg, mcdeint=1, mcdeint=2, mcdeint=3)

The xine User Interface package contains a multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, MPEG and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet.

The above file is created and maintainable through the xine setup dialog box. The documentation for the configuration settings is located at /usr/share/doc/xine-ui-0.99.14/README.config_en.

This is an X11 based GUI for the libxine video player library.It provides xine, a skin based media player that can play all theaudio/video formats that libxine supports. Currently, this includes MPEG1/2,some AVI and Quicktime files, some network streaming methods and disc basedmedia (VCD, SVCD, DVD). A more complete list can be found on DVDs on the market today are play-protected by the Content ScramblingSystem (CSS). Xine does not provide any code to descramble those DVDs,because of legal uncertainties. Have a look at/usr/share/doc/xine-ui/README.Debian for more information! Tags: User Interface: Graphical User Interface, Text-based Interactive, interface::x11, network::client, Role: Program, Scope: Application, Sound and Music: sound::player, uitoolkit::gtk, Interface Toolkit: Ncurses TUI, Purpose: Playing Media, Works with: works-with::audio, works-with::video, X Window System: Application

It is a good idea to have a short MPEG test file for evaluating various players and options. Since some DVD applications look for DVD media in /dev/dvd by default, or have this device name hardcoded in them, it might be useful to make a symbolic link to the proper device:

Due to the nature of devfs(5), manually created links will not persist after a system reboot. In order to recreate the symbolic link automatically when the system boots, add the following line to /etc/devfs.conf:

There are several possible ways to display video under Xorg and what works is largely hardware dependent. This guide will focus on the Xvideo extension which allows video to be directly displayed, even on low-end machines.

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. Get started by installing the package:

In practice, xine requires either a fast CPU or support for the XVideo extension. The xine video player performs best on XVideo interfaces. If in the previous step, the Xvideo extension was unsupported, issues may occur.

media-libs/xine-lib is the package that carries the core of xine video player. Differently from media-video/mplayer that is a standalone program, xine frontends uses libxine to play video files. This has the disadvantages that a crash inside libxine shows up as a crash of the frontend itself, and that the included copies of libraries might end up in symbols' collisions if they aren't taken care correctly.

For this reason the media-libs/xine-lib package must be managed carefully, to avoid adding dangerous crashes that might be difficult to reproduce (the same happened in the past). As in many cases the crashes are difficult to grasp just looking at the code, as there might be symbols collisions and similar stuff, to report bugs it's important to produce also a valid backtrace of the crash.

Here you'll find a lot of "why and how" about media-libs/xine-lib and related packages like media-video/xine-ui, media-video/gxine and so on. Hopefully, this guide will be updated during the time, also when maintainer changes.

media-libs/xine-lib used to be heavy patched on Portage tree; although the original reason was because of automagic dependencies, there were patches and fixes for those external projects (likeffmpeg orvidix ) that weren't being applied by upstream.

Since version 1.1.2 the patchset is heavily reduced, also because the former maintainer (Petten Diego Petten) is now contributing directly to xine project . For this reason, while he's present, it's a good idea to pass through him for patches that are needed.

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