xine
History
The xine project was started in 2000 by Günter Bartsch shortly after
LinuxTag. At that time playing
in
Linux was described as a tortuous process since one had to manually create audio and video
and start their separated decoder processes.
Günter 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.
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.
Günter left the project in 2003 when he officially announced the new project leaders, Miguel Freitas, Michael Roitzsch, Mike Melanson, and Thibaut Mattern.
Supported media formats
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Physical media: compact disc, ,
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Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, QuickTime, MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
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Audio formats: AAC, AC3, Apple Lossless, AMR, FLAC, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
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: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, RealVideo, Sorenson codec, Theora, WMV (partial, including WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3; via FFmpeg)
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Video devices: V4L, DVB, PVR
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Network protocols: HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTP, SMB, MMS, Netpbm format, RTSP
DVD issues
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
encryption 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.
Other issues
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.
Graphical user interface
The xine project offers graphical front-ends for xine, including one based on
Xlib and another on GTK+, along with a browser plugin.
Other front-ends for xine are available from other projects.
xine backend
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.
See also
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List of codecs
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Open source codecs and containers
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Comparison of video codecs
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Comparison of audio coding formats
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Comparison of container formats
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Screencast
