xine is a

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

playback engine for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. xine is built around a

shared library In computing, a library is a collection of System resource, resources that can be leveraged during software development to implement a computer program. Commonly, a library consists of executable code such as compiled function (computer scienc ...

(xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries from other projects such as liba52, libmpeg2, FFmpeg, libmad, FAAD2, and Ogle. 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.

History

The xine project was started in 2000 by Günter Bartsch shortly after LinuxTag. At that time playing DVDs in

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

was described as a tortuous process since one had to manually create audio and video named pipes 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

*Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs * Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM,

RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format (digital), container format created by RealNetworks with the filename extension . RealMedia is used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio, while also being used for Streaming media, st ...

*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 RealVideo, also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary format, proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks — the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 15. RealV ...

, Sorenson,

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

, WMV (partial, including WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3; via FFmpeg) *Video devices: V4L, DVB, PVR *Network protocols:

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

, TCP, UDP, RTP, SMB, MMS, PNM, RTSP

DVD issues

Since it is not a member of DVD Forum, the xine project is not contractually obliged to insert

user operation prohibition The user operation prohibition (abbreviated UOP) is a form of digital rights management, use restriction used on video DVD discs and Blu-ray Disc, Blu-ray discs. Most DVD player, DVD players and Blu-ray players prohibit the viewer from performing ...

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 The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

, 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 GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one f ...

as a backend for the Phonon media framework used by

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

and Qt.

References

{{Media player (application software), free 2000 software Cross-platform software Free media players Free software programmed in C Free video software Linux DVD players Linux media players Multimedia frameworks Software that uses FFmpeg Video software that uses GTK Video software that uses Qt