xine

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xine project
Developed by	xine team
Written in	C
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Media player
License	GPL
Website	xinehq.de

xine-lib
Stable release	1.1.12 (2008-04-15) _[+/−]

xine-ui

Stable release	0.99.5 (May 3, 2007 (2007-05-03); 405 days ago]) _[+/−]
Preview release	_[+/−]

gxine

Stable release	0.5.901 (2008-03-08) _[+/−]

xine-plugin
Stable release	1.0.1 (2008-04-02) _[+/−]

xine (officially pronounced [ksi:n]^[1]) 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. Another important feature of xine is the ability to manually correct the synchronization of audio and video streams. xine uses libraries from other projects such as liba52, libmpeg2, FFmpeg, libmad, FAAD2, and Ogle.^[2] 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.^[3]

1 History
2 Supported media formats ^[6]
3 DVD issues
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

xine was started in 2000 by Guenter Bartsch shortly after LinuxTag. At that time playing DVDs in Linux was described as a tortuous process^[4] since one had to manually create audio and video named pipes and start their separated decoder processes.

Guenter 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.^[5]

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]}

Guenter left the project in 2003 when he officially announced the new project leaders, Miguel Freitas, Michael Roitzsch, Mike Melanson and Thibaut Mattern.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Supported media formats ^[6]

Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV (partial, including WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3; via FFmpeg)
Video devices: V4L, DVB, PVR
Network protocols: HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTP, SMB, MMS, PNM, RTSP

[edit] DVD issues

Since xine 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, they also cannot support DVD CSS encryption without 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.^{[citation needed]}