Xine - Download of the Month

Xine (Download of the Month)

Xine is a powerful and high-performance video player that can handle a huge variety of video formats, including MPEG 1, 2 & 4, divx 3, 4 & 5, Windows Media video 7, and many more. It can play DVD's, Video CD's, Audio CD's, .mpeg, .avi, .asf, .wmv, .wma, .mov, .mp3, .wav and lots of other file formats - frankly, there's not much it can't handle. There's support for various audio codecs, as well as a variety of audio and video drivers.

Xine has plenty of advanced features. All the usual stuff is there, such as DVD and VCD menus, but there's also support for subtitles and closed captions, de-interlacing, on-screen display, video controls for brightness, contrast, etc. and image snapshots. Xine is actually implemented as a collection of libraries and a core engine, making it suitable for incorporation into other programs such as Mozilla, but it stands almost alone, in conjunction with any of a selection of front-end programs. Just which program you choose depends in part on which desktop UI (GNOME, KDE or other) you favour, as well as personal preference and functionality.

Installation

Installation is actually surprisingly simple for such a sophisticated program

From the Xine web site, download the xine-lib-1.0.tar.gz source code tarball, and select one of the various front-end programs - in this example, I'll use xine-ui-0.99.3.tar.gz since it's the most general, but you'll see there are many others to choose from. Give the following commands:

su
tar xzvf xine-lib-1.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf xine-ui-0.99.3.tar.gz
cd xinet-lib-1.0
./configure
make install
ldconfig
cd ../xie-ui-0.99.3
./configure
make install
exit
xine

That's it - you now have Xine running! If you have a DVD drive, pop in a DVD and click on the DVD button, the DVD should start playing. If you want to play some .mpeg or other files, then open the playlist by clicking on the icon at top left of the control panel.

Download from: http://xinehq.de/

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