What is the xine engine?

The xine engine is a free media player engine. It comes in the form of a shared libarary and is typically used by media player frontends and other multimedia applications for playback of multimedia streams such as movies, radio/tv network streams, DVDs, VCDs.

What's the aim and scope of this text?

The primary goal of this FAQ is to cover all recurring questions related to the xine engine. Frontend specific questions are not covered here.

My question is not yet covered here - where can I ask for help?

First of all be sure that your question is really not covered here and that you haven't just been a bit too lazy to read through all of this text. ;-). Also check out the xine HOWTO and documentation specific to the frontend (e.g. xine-ui or gxine or totem ).

That said - you are welcome to mail to our user mailing list: <xine-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Please provide some info about your setup so people have a chance to help you, e.g. include information about your audio/video hardware and drivers you use, operating system, cpu type and some console output/any error messages. Also include command line parameters you have specified and information about the type of stream you're trying to play back. Also very important is the version of xine you're using and information about any additional plugins you may have installed on your system.

What are those xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine, ... modules in cvs for?

Some time ago xine just became too complex to be just one big program. Therefore it was split into two major parts.

xine-lib is simply speaking the engine of xine. It contains all plugins and is necessary to run anything that relies on xine (this is the part that is covered in this FAQ).

Then there are frontends - applications that use xine. The most common frontend is that of a media player. There are currently two frontends being developed in the xine project, xine-ui (skinned dvd-player style frontend directly based on xlib) and gxine, a desktop media-player style frontend using the standard gtk widget set and comes with a mozilla browser plugin. External projects like sinek and totem develop additional frontends. In the future you will likely see more and different types of apllications being developed which will use the xine engine for video processing and other multimedia purposes.

If you simply want a media/dvd player, you'll need to install xine-lib first and then choose and install a player frontend like xine-ui or gxine.

Other modules in CVS: xine-plugin a mozilla browser plugin for streaming media playback using xine (at the time of this writing unmaintained and somewhat obsoleted by gxine's browser plugin), xine-www the xine project website sources.

Where and how do I get the latest development version?

Be advised that end-users should stick to the official xine releases. CVS is only intended for developers.

To check out xine-modules from CVS, first do this:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine login [empty password]

then, to check out individual modules (e.g. xine-lib, gxine, xine-ui):

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine co modulename

Where can I find pre-compiled binaries, e.g. RPMs?

The xine project does not provide pre-compiled binaries for legal reasons (some parts of xine may be covered by patents in some countries). Some OS projects/vendors (e.g. debian, freebsd, ...) offer binaries for their distributions - please contact them for further info. You can also find links to third parties providing xine RPMs on the xine homepage : http://xine.sf.net/index.php/about

See the next chapter of this FAQ for instructions on how to build xine from source.

What do I need to compile everything properly?

First of all an official and stable release of gcc. Also be aware that patched gcc versions may break parts of xine and are therefore not supported by the xine project.

Furthermore you'll have to use GNU make to compile xine. On most GNU/Linux systems "make" is GNU make - on other platforms use "gmake" instead. Also, zlib iss required (including the appropriate header files, which are often found in a package called zlib-devel or similar.)

If you want to compile xine from CVS, you'll need to have the autobuild tools installed (automake, autoconf and libtool - in recent versions).

Frontends might need additional libraries, e.g. for gxine you'll need to have GTK installed. Make sure you have not only the shared libraries themselves but also the header files (often packaged seperately as so-called -dev packages) on your system.

Some plugins that come with the xine engine need additional libraries (otherwise they will not be built). For example, libogg and libvorbis (plus their include files) are needed for ogg/vorbis support.

Don't worry about this too much right now, xine's configure (see below) will check for all the stuff needed and will tell you what's missing (which means that you should check the output it produces carefully ;) )

How do I compile xine?

        tar xfvz tarballname.tar.gz
      

        ./configure
	make install
      

        ldconfig
      

        ./configure
	make install
      

      export PATH="$prefix/bin:$PATH"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$prefix/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
      

      ./autogen.sh [-> *only* if you checked your sources out of CVS]
      ./configure
      make
      make install
      

Making your own RPM packages (xine-lib, xine-ui)

Basically you will only have to issue one command, if you have just downloaded a source tarball from our web site:

rpm -ta THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_SOURCE_TAR_BALL

This will start the binary and source RPM building. After compiling is finished, a binary rpm is placed in your rpm binary directory which is usally /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/[YOUR_ARCHITECTURE] and a source RPM is written to your rpm source dir (e.g. /usr/src/RPM/SRPMS).

In case that you have a fresh CVS checkout, you will need to do the following first in order to get a tarball release out of it which you can later use with the rpm -ta command above:

./autogen.sh && make clean && make dist

In any case, please keep in mind that you have to build and install xine-lib first before you can proceed with xine-ui.

Can I provide additional CFLAGS for compilation?

Yes, you can do so by setting the CFLAGS variable and then run configure again.

This can be useful to specify additional include paths or library paths to the compiler.

Example: export CFLAGS="-I/usr/include -L/home/guenter/xine_libs"

Are there binaries for my AMD K7 (Athlon (TM) ) available? Can I build them?

If you have a recent gcc you can try to compile "more" k7 support in (esp. better instruction scheduling). If the configure script should fail to detect your processor/gcc correctly, try setting the xine_BUILD envvar explicitly to a valid description string for your configuration, e.g.

    export xine_BUILD=k7-pc-linux-gnu
    rm -f config.cache
    ./autogen.sh
    make
    make install
    

Build problems: xine engine (xine-lib)

Build problems: frontend (gxine/xine-ui/...)

Can I install xine in my home directory (without being root) ?

yes. first set up a subdir where you install your private software, eg

      $ mkdir ~/usr
    

then you have to set a few environment variables - it's probably a good idea to add this to your ~/.bashrc (or somewhere similar):

      export PATH="$HOME/usr/bin:$PATH"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
      export CFLAGS="-I$HOME/usr/include -L$HOME/usr/lib -O3"
      export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I $HOME/usr/share/aclocal"
    

now you can unpack tarballs e.g. in ~/usr/src (mkdir ~/usr/src if necessary) and do a

      $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
      $ make install
    

DVD Playback with xine

Can I watch Video CDs (VCDs)? SVCDS ? CD-i?

xine supports VCD and SVCD playback out-of-the box. Similar to DVDs, make sure you have a /dev/cdrom alias pointing to your CDROM drive which you will use to play back the (S)VCD.

At the moment, CD-i formats are not supported by xine.

Do not try to mount the (S)VCD. Simply insert it into your CDROM drive and hit the VCD autoplay button or start something like

gxine VCD://

from the command line.

Can I watch Quicktime (.mov, .mp4) files using xine?

Quicktime is just a system layer (container format) which can contain various different audio and video formats. The system layer itself is fully supported in xine. However, only very few typically used quicktime audio/video codecs are natively supported yet. Luckily, if you are using a x86 compatible machine (any recent PC hardware should do) you can install and use the original Quicktime DLLs and watch most streams (trailers) that can be downloaded from the net.

Possibly the most convenient way to get the Quicktime DLLs is to download them from the mplayer website http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/. The package is called "QuickTime5 DLLs". Unpack it and move everything you find inside to /usr/lib/win32 (actually you can place them anywhere you want, e.g. someplace in your homedirectory, but then you'll have to set codec.win32_path in your xine config file accordingly). Restart xine then and you should be able to watch Quicktime trailers.

Real Network files/streams

Can I watch Windows Media (.asf/.wmv) files using xine?

While the container format (system layer) ASF (wmv is just an alias) is fully supported in xine, for newer windows media 8 and 9 based streams you'll need to install windows binary codecs (.DLLs).

Possibly the most convenient way to get the windows DLLs is to download them from the mplayer website http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/. The package is called "Win32 Codecpack". Unpack it and move everything you find inside to /usr/lib/win32 (actually you can place them anywhere you want, e.g. someplace in your homedirectory, but then you'll have to set codec.win32_path in your xine config file accordingly). Restart xine then and you should be able to watch windows media streams.

Can I watch Digital TV (Digital Video Broadcast) using xine ?

At the time of this writing DVB support is a very new and experimental feature in xine. The number of supported cards is pretty limited at the moment. See doc/README.dvb (in the xine-lib tarball) for details.

How do I play streams from STDIN?

Use something like:

cat stream.mpg | gxine stdin:/

How can I watch files with external AVI subtitles?

In xine 0.9.13 this used to be:

xine foo.avi%bar.sub

Latest xine-lib modules (1-beta3 or newer) support external subtitles for any media file, not only AVI. In order to use it you can pass an special MRL construction like:

xine test.mpg#subtitle:file.sub

The external subtitles support can also be used by any xine frontend. Currently, just xine-ui implements this feature with a subtitle selection dialog (press control+shift+s to see it).

I have a lot of dropped frames - what can I do?

Your hardware might be too slow for xine. Make sure you turn on all speed optimizing options. A few things you should check (in order of importance):

• First of all, run the xine-check script included in xine-lib package (probably already installed in your system). xine-check will report several of the most common problems listed here. Sample output from xine-check:

  $ xine-check Please be patient, this script may take a while to run... [ good ] you're using Linux, doing specific tests [ good ] looks like you have a /proc filesystem mounted. [ good ] You seem to have a reasonable kernel version (2.4.18) [ good ] intel compatible processor, checking MTRR support [ good ] you have MTRR support and there are some ranges set. [ good ] found the player at /usr/local/bin/xine [ good ] /usr/local/bin/xine is in your PATH [ good ] found /usr/local/bin/xine-config in your PATH [ good ] plugin directory /usr/local/lib/xine/plugins exists. [ good ] found input plugins [ good ] found demux plugins [ good ] found decoder plugins [ good ] found video_out plugins [ good ] found audio_out plugins [ good ] skin directory /usr/local/share/xine/skins exists. [ good ] found logo in /usr/local/share/xine/skins [ good ] I even found some skins. [ good ] /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdc [ good ] /dev/dvd points to /dev/hdc [ good ] DMA is enabled for your DVD drive [ good ] found xvinfo: X-Video Extension version 2.2 [ good ] your Xv extension supports YUV overlays (improves MPEG performance) [ good ] your Xv extension supports packed YUV overlays [ good ] Xv ports: YUY2 YV12 I420 UYVY

• Try to use the Xv driver, it greatly improves performance and quality because hardware does image scaling and color conversion. The video section contains important information about several Xv drivers.

  If Xv cannot be used for some reason, make sure your display is set up to 16bpp, not 24 or higher (reduces memory bandwith). Some Xv drivers may also have better performance with 16bpp.

• Make sure the hard drive (or cdrom/dvd drive) which supplies the video data is in DMA mode (if supported)

  On most linux-based systems, you can use hdparm to check this. Example:

  hdparm /dev/hda ... using_dma = 1 (on) ...

  You can enable DMA mode with the following command:

  hdparm -d1 device_of_your_drive_that_supplies_video_data

  In some cases where this fails it helps to specify the dma mode to use, for example:

  hdparm -d1 -X 66 device_of_your_drive_that_supplies_video_data

  In RedHat 8.0 an additional entry in /etc/modules.conf

  options ide-cd dma=1

  should help (reboot for this change to take effect).

  More information about this may be found here: http://oreilly.linux.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html

• Use a recent kernel which is optimized for your hardware. Old kernels may lack support for accelerated instructions like SSE, for example.

• Close other applications (use a tool like "top" to find out what applications are using up CPU power). Programs that update the system clock like ntp should also be disabled.

• Enable MTRR support in your kernel. If you are still using XFree 3.x, you'll have to tell the kernel yourself where the graphics memory is. You'll find details about that in the linux dvd howto.

  If you're using XFree 4.x, enabling MTRR support in your kernel should be enough (use a recent kernel!).

  Try a cat /proc/mtrr - if the file exists and you find an entry corresponding to the amount of graphics memory you have, everything should be fine.

• Have your X-server (usually XFree86) running with higher priority. Most recent linux distributions (like RedHat 8.0 or Mandrake 9.0) should do that for you, improving not only xine but desktop responsiveness in general.

  Use the "top" utility and verify under the "NI" column if the X process has a negative value, this indicates a higher priority. See "The X Window User HOWTO - Performance considerations" for further instructions http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XWindow-User-HOWTO/performance.html

• Use the latest or a known-good gcc version.

• Besides boosting X-server priority, sometimes it's possible to avoid discarding frames by making xine itself higher priority. This is not a recommended pratice since it will require to run xine as root, but you may give it a try if you want:

  nice --5 xine

• xine needs high speed memory access which depends on your chip set. Make sure you enable all speed-improving options.

  Especially the via apollo pro chipset is known to be quite weird, (most of all on my gigabyte board). If you can't configure the ram access thoroughly using the bios you might want to try some really nasty tricks, as explained on (for example):

  http://www.overclockers.com/tips105/index03.asp

  This website centers around a windows-tool to tweak the chipset, you can do the same on FreeBSD with pciconf. On some linux distributions there are similar tools.

• a nice performance tuning tool can be found here: http://powertweak.sourceforge.net

• Set up and use raw devices for dvd access. Please note that this is usually not worth the effort as the performance gain from it is very small if any.

  Raw devices should be available in linux kernel 2.4.x and there are patches for older kernels available from: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/sct/raw-io/

  To use raw devices, first connect a free raw device to your dvd device, use something like:

  raw /dev/raw1 /dev/hdc

  then create a link named "rdvd" pointing to that raw device:

  raw /dev/raw1 /dev/hdc

• For slow / high-latency dvd drives it might help to increase the number of video buffers xine allocates. Try setting

  video.num_buffers:500

  to a higher value (e.g. 1000 or 2500)

Oki, xine doesn't drop frames now but video output still is not really smooth

video output can be further improved by tuning your linux kernel:

• set HZ to 1000 in /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h

• try applying scheduler patches, especially the O(1) and the preemptive patches have proven useful at the time of this writing (spring 2003).

Miguel Freitas has written a nice article about his kernel multimedia experiments here.

I have problems when using xine on FreeBSD, Solaris, ... !

Check out the the corresponding README files in the directory xine-lib/doc

What is aalib? How do I use it in xine?

aalib is an ascii art library. xine comes with an aalib video output plugin so you can watch movies in your xterm, on the console or on your old vt100 - very cool ;> ... another nice option is to preview movies on a remote server in your shell over ssh.

To use it make sure you have aalib installed correctly before you configure/build xine-lib and xine-ui. In addition to the xine binary a binary named aaxine should get built and installed. You can then use something like:

aaxine foo.mpg

to use aalib video output.

What do all these ~/.xine/config (~/.gxine/config) entries mean?

You can find information about them in xine-lib/doc/README.config_en. Frontends may register additional config entries, you may find out more about them in their documentation. Also the comments in the config file might help.

Does xine support my dxr3 / hollywood+ card?

while xine's focus is clearly on software decoding, the dxr3 is supported.

you can find more information about using xine with the dxr3 here (also covers how to do tv output using the dxr3).

What audio drivers does xine support? OSS? Alsa? Arts? Esd?

Currently xine support audio output via OSS (kernel audio drivers), ALSA 0.9.x (ALSA 0.5.x is no longer supported), arts (KDE's sound daemon) and esound (esd, gnome's sound daemon - not recommended because it has serious issues with a/v sync).

When I'm watching a movie, the sound effects are much higher volume than the voices

Congratulations, you seem to have an original movie audio track there.

Uhm. So you don't like it. Well, there are two things you can do:

• You can enable xine's audio compressor. Most frontends have a settings window and in that you'll find a slider for the compressor setting. The values are percent values, so a slider setting of 200 means that xine will double the volume of silent parts of the movie (loud parts stay the same).

• If you have a dolby digital (AC3) soundtrack, you can try to enable liba52's dynamic range compression setting

  codec.a52_dynrng:1

  in your xine config file (or use some gui config dialog).

When I play this stream, xine shows video but there's no audio!

Well, first try a different audio driver ( gxine -A oss , gxine -A arts , xine -A alsa ...).

If this problem only occurs with one specific stream, maybe switching to a different audio channel (using the gui) helps. Some DVD streams have audio on strange channels.

If all this doesn't help, maybe you're missing an audio codec or you found a bug. If you decide to post your problem on the xine-user mailing list, make sure to include all console output xine produced and also clearly state what type of stream you tried to play back or, even better, make a test stream available somewhere for developers to download and try.

Can xine produce 4-/5-channel surround audio output?

Yep, it can do that using OSS or ALSA drivers, provided that the driver supports it. On startup xine tells you what modes are supported by your audio driver, e.g:

audio_alsa_out : supported modes are mono stereo (4-channel not enabled in xine config) (5-channel not enabled in xine config) (5.1-channel not enabled in xine config) (a/52 and DTS pass-through not enabled in xine config)

On this machine 4-channel surround would be possible. However, since xine cannot detect if there are actually speakers connected to the additional channels, you'll have to activate that feature manually.

You can do this either in the config dialog while xine is running (press the config button on the xine panel and go to the AUDIO tab) or have it the complicated way by editing the config file yourself which is located in your home directory in .gxine/.xine:

# 4-channel: audio.four_channel:1 # 5-channel: audio.five_channel:1 # 5.1-channel audio.five_lfe_channel:0

What about ac3 output via spdif to an external ac3 decoder?

xine can do that too. Pretty much the same story as for 4-/5-channel surround (see above). You can either use the config dialog or edit the config file (~/.xine/config/~/.gxine/config) yourself:

audio.a52_pass_through:1

Getting SPDIF output from a SBLive 5.1 using OSS drivers

The following explains how to get the above configuration going with xine. Some parts of it may applicable to other configurations (cards that use the EMU10k1 chip) as well.

   What you need to make the cable yourself :
   a) stereo 3.5mm jack plug
   b) RCA plug
   c) shielded cable (video coax 75 Ohm will do)

   Connect them as follows :
   
   center pin jackplug ------|----- center pin RCA plug
             	   GND     __|__    GND
      

Changing the volume with the GUI control has no effect! What's up!?

Some xine drivers do not support volume changing although the GUI will show the volume bar. Usually this is not xine's fault: aRts C API, for example, doesn't offer any volume property to applications. Similarly, with ac3 pass through it is not possible to set the volume.

Note that recently we added support to "simulate" volume in aRts by changing sample values on-the-fly before delivering them to the driver. Not as good as having access to sound card's mixer but at least users will not complain about lacking of volume bar anymore! :)

Audio is stuttering and i see a lot of "metronom: fixing sound card drift by -2115 pts" on the console output

Might be a soundcard problem, if it only comes in longer intervals. Your soundcard does not keep it's sampling frequency accurately enough, which results in audio and video getting out of sync and xine has to compensate. If you see the message only from time to time, you might remedy it by using the resampling sync method. You can do this by setting the configuration entry audio.av_sync_method to resample.

If you receive the metronom message more often, maybe switching to different drivers (alsa to oss or vise-versa) can help here. It has also been reported that setting the configuration entry audio.force_rate to the native sampling rate of your soundcard (try 44100 and 48000) helps sometimes.

Another, whole different possibility is that you have some background process running which is messing with the clock (like some ntp client - chronny, ntpd, ...).

Occasional messages of "fixing sound card drift" may happen on start and when playing a long stream (like a movie). This is normal behaviour, nothing to worry about.

xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback, especially with DVDs

You are using the OSS audio output plugin, right? In order to keep video and audio in sync, xine regularly queries the audio driver for the amount of delay induced by the current length of the driver's audio buffer. Unfortunately some OSS drivers seem to be broken because the can return strange values here. This confuses the xine audio subsystem and makes it drop audio.

You should try the various settings of the configuration entry audio.oss_sync_method. The options getodelay and getoptr ask the driver and might therefore show the problem. But chances are that only one is broken and the other works, so you should try them both first, since they are the most accurate. The option probebuffer does not ask the driver directly but tries to determine the buffer length from outside. This should work with any driver and is the way to go, of the driver dependent methods fail. softsync is the least accurate and should be used only in emergency situations.

I can hear the audio - but I don't see a picture!

Probably your hardware is simply too slow - see above for some hints on how to speed things up.

Another possibility is that you using a buggy Xv driver, see the next question.

How can I make xine use the Xv extension and what drivers do I need?

xine will normally use Xv by default if it is available. In some cases you might need to choose Xv playback manually (when the ~/.xine/config file for some reason says that you want to use XShm):

xine -V Xv foo.mpg

If this doesn't work for you, it may be possible that Xv is not present on your system.

First you need to install/use XFree 4.x. Once you got that you have to make sure the XFree drivers you're using are supporting Xv on your hardware. Here are some hints for individual gfx chips:

• 3Dfx: if all you get is a solid black window, upgrade at least to XFree 4.1.0

• ATI: if you only get "half a picture", try lowering your resolution or bit depth, disable DRI (looks like you ran out of video RAM)

• Trident card: If you see vertical bands jumbled, upgrade to the latest xfree/experimental trident drivers (for the CyberBlade XP a driver exists here: http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/ )

• nvidia: With newer GeForce cards, Xv should work with XFree 4.2.0 or newer, for older RivaTNT cards use the binary drivers from nvidia (of course the binary drivers work as well for GeForce cards)

• Mach64/Rage3D (not Rage128/Radeon) cards/chips get no XVideo with standard drivers, try GATOS drivers instead

• intel: i815 has Xv support in XFree 4.x, others unknown

• Permedia 2/3 has Xv support in XFree 4.x

• Savage: at least some older drivers tend to lock up the whole machine, try the drivers available from www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html .

• SIS: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in XFree 4.x

• Chips and Tech 6555x, 68554, 69000, 69030 have Xv support in XFree 4.x

• NeoMagic: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in Xfree 4.x

• SiliconMotion: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in Xfree 4.x

• Matrox: G200 or newer (but not Parhelia) have Xv support in XFree 4.x. For parhelia, use the binary only drivers available from matrox' website.

Some parts of my X Desktop get transparent when xine plays the video!

Looks like some colors on your GUI match the colorkey Xv uses. You can change the colorkey value to avoid this. There should be a line like:

video.XV_COLORKEY:2110

in your ~/.xine/config file where you can change the color that's used by xine for the video overlay.

The aspect ratio of the video is wrong!

Try pressing "a" to change the aspect ratio.

What is the difference between discarded and skipped frames?

Sometimes xine will output a message like that:

200 frames delivered, XX frames skipped, YY frames discarded

The difference between these counters is a little subtle for the non developer. There are two threads running in order to display video: the decoder thread will deliver frames to the video output thread. The later is responsible for scheduling the frames to be displayed at the right time.

If your system can't keep up with decoding requirements, decoder will deliver overdue frames. Imagine if it finished decoding the frame tagged for displaying at 11:30 but xine clock marks 11:31. When this situation is detected, xine will try to skip decoding a few frames to recover. Not every decoder may support this feature.

When the frame is decoded to be shown somewhere in future but the output thread doesn't get scheduled in time by the operating system to complete the operation, the frame is discarded. One cause might be the disk access operation, which may halt the system for a few miliseconds without DMA. See performance section tips above.

Note that if a decoder can't skip frames for some reason, you would never see frames skipped (they would be all discarded).

My xine is runing in black and white! / I only get a gray video output!

This frequently happens with new Xv drivers or when switching to a different video card. Background is that different Xv drivers often use different ranges for the contrast/brightness/saturation settings.

To fix this, try opening the xine settings window and try adjusting the sliders for contrast, brightness and saturation.

Please note that some frontends save these settings in their config file so when you have found a working combination, make sure you exit xine cleanly so the values are saved.

Which is the best video driver to use?

xine support several video drivers for outputing the image. These will differ on how the frames are copied to the video card memory, whether colorspace conversion and scaling is done in software or hardware, among other things. They may also differ on ease of use and stability.

Most of the time, Xv should give the users a good trade-off between quality, compatibility and ease of use. This is why xine tries to use Xv by default.

However some users may want to explore better the available hardware capabilities (eg. syncing frame drawing with monitor refresh). Also some Xv drivers contain slow copies and accessing the video card directly may yield performance gains.

Drivers that access hardware directly includes VIDIX (warning: requires root priviledges) and SyncFB (requires kernel helper - Matrox only). User may try one of those, but should be warned that with root access they can cause the system to crash hard. The support is also limited to a couple of graphics cards only.

Graphic workstations like SGI have usually a good support for OpenGL. In that case, using OpenGL may be a better choice than XShm. However for most desktop systems the performance of OpenGL will be quite bad.

Starting xine fails with complains about audio drivers/devices!

You can select the audio driver using the -A option. So try:

xine -A null

If you have ALSA drivers installed, try:

xine -A alsa

If you run ESD (not recommended), try:

xine -A esd

If you run artsd, try:

xine -A arts

"no video port found"

You got the Xv extension, but your video card driver doesn't support it. First try to find a driver that does support Xv on your hardware (check your graphics card vendor). If your driver has Xv support but you can't get it working, try at a lower resolution (1024x768 is enough even for anamorphic mpeg-2).

If all that fails, you can still use plain X11/XShm:

gxine -V XShm foo.vob

"Unable to open dvd drive (/dev/dvd)"

You probably don't have /dev/dvd (check that). If so, simply create a link /dev/dvd that points to your DVD device. Something like...

cd /dev ln -s hdc dvd

...should do the job. Also make sure you have read access on the device the symlink points to. See the dvd playback section for more information.

"demux error! 00 00 00 (should be 0x000001)"

Probably xine can't access your input source. Most commonly this happens when you're trying to play locked/encrypted DVDs. Remember that xine can't play such DVDs out-of-the box for legal reasons (see above).

If it is legal where you live, you can try to install libdvdcss. Once you have done that and re-start xine, it should automatically detect and use it to play back encrypted DVDs.

Another reason could be that your (RPC-2) DVD drive isn't set up for the right region (see above).

"audio driver 'oss' failed, using null driver instead"

First of all, make sure that your OSS Audio drivers are working (i.e. you can play music with other software). Maybe you're using alsa? If so, try gxine -A alsa to see if this helps.

The most common reason for oss not working is that some other program is accesing your audio device. If you're using linux, the command fuser /dev/dsp should give you the PID of the process.

If you are using GNOME, chances are that this is caused by ESD. Now you have two possibilities. Either deactivate ESD (temporarily) by right clicking on the sound monitor applet and selecting "Place Esound in standby" or just kill it. Then xine will use OSS audio output. The other method is to make xine use ESD for audio output with:

gxine -A esd

This may result in worse playback - exact syncronization is not possible with esd, so using oss should be preferred.

If you are using KDE, there is the possibility that the aRts sound daemon is currently running and thus blocking your sound device. You can check that by starting the aRts control (in your KDE menu it should be under Multimedia). If it is running, you can either use the aRts audio output plugin:

gxine -A arts

Or you suspend the aRts daemon by checking the appropriate option in your aRts control. (recommended)

Newer versions of arts have an auto-suspend mode - this can lead to some nondeterministic behaviour of xine if it is set up to use the audio device directly. Using arts is recommended in that case, however you will loose the ability to do four/five channel audio output.

"video_out: throwing away image with pts xxx because it's too old"

This is a performance related problem. If you have a fast computer and this message shows from time to time playing dvd/cdrom, it's very likely that your drive is not DMA enabled.

"No video plugin available to decode 'xxxxxx'."

You have tried to play a stream using a unknown or unhandled codec. Possibly the file uses some obscure proprietary format and no information is available on how to decode it.

If you're on an x86 platform (e.g. PC hardware) you might want to try installing binary-only windows medial, real networks and quicktime codecs (see above).

"w32codec: decoder failed to start. Is 'xxxxxx' installed?"

You probably don't have the win32 dll needed to decode this file.

xine just crashed on me - i didn't get any error message

OK, yes, that shouldn't happen and you're upset. We can understand that. But, to help you and of course to fix this, we need some information. So, let's go through the checklist and maybe prepare a nice bug report for the xine-user mailing list:

• did xine really crash (segfault) or did it hang (deadlock) ?

• can you reproduce the bug? (e.g. do you remember what you did and when you do it again it crashes again?)

• is that a specific media file or format which crashes xine? (have you tried other files types?)

• check the console output (and include it in a bug report), maybe earlier there is some output that points to the problem.

• Your X server just froze on you? unfortunately that's a known problem with some chipsets and drivers (most commonly Savage chipsets) when using Xv. You might want to try running gxine -V XShm to see if the problem is related to the Xv driver. This will unfortunately be much slower, as lots of things are now done in software instead of hardware scaling/colour space conversion.

  Maybe at the time you read this, there's an XFree upgrade which fixes this for the Savage driver. If that works for you, please notify the xine crew at < xine-user@lists.sf.net >, so they can update this FAQ!

• Even though we try to make each release as bug free as possible, xine is still under heavy development (nice excuse, isn't it? *grin*).

  If you write to the xine user mailing list <xine-user@lists.sourceforge.net> make sure you include a the above information (when applicable) and also some information about your machine (operating system, cpu type and speed, gfx card, sound card, ...) and please use a meaningfull subject line ("xine bug" is bad, "xine fails to play this quicktime trailer in fullscreen mode" ist much better).

  Thanks for taking the time to help improve xine.