Copied from http://www.xinehq.de.
free, fast, portable and reusable
xine is a free (GPL-licensed) high-performance, portable and reusable multimedia playback engine. xine itself is a shared library with an easy to use, yet powerful API (link) which is used by many applications for smooth video playback and video processing purposes. Read more about xine's features on the xine features page.
platforms
xine tries to be as portable as possible. Supported platforms include:
* GNU/Linux (x86, alpha, sparc, PPC, ...) * FreeBSD (x86) * Solaris (sparc and x86) * Irix (MIPS) * Darwin/MacOS X (ppc) via the fink project (link)
Support for the following platforms is in progress (help is always appreciated):
* MS Windows (partially working and commited to CVS) * HP-UX (patches received) * OpenBSD (patches received) * OS/2 (external site)
Many different video output plugins ("drivers") exist. If you're using X11, the use of XFree's Xv extension (XFree 4.x) is highly recommended. Xv makes use of some capabilities of video cards (most notably colorspace conversion and scaling) for faster and smoother playback. Audio output is supported on OSS, Alsa, artsd, esd (not recommended) and IRIXAL (irix/mips only), sun audio.
requirements
The xine engine has very few dependancies. zlib is the only library required to compile xine-lib (however, for full functionality additional libraries, e.g. libX11, libvorbis, libogg, libtheora, ... should be installed). The build system is a standard automake/autoconf/libtool build environment, so to compile releases only GNU make and gcc (preferably the latest release) are required. frontends may need additional libraries, e.g. xine-ui needs libpng and optionally aalib, gxine needs gtk 2.0. For all libraries complete installations are needed, including headers. If you install them from RPMs/DEBs or similar distribution-provided packages, be sure you install the developer packages as well.
contact / support
xine-user is the mailing list for open discussions about xine. Anyone interested in xine is welcome to subscribe to this list. If you have a questions or comments about xine, feel free to post them there :-) You can also check out #xine on irc.openprojects.net.
external xine resources
The following external web sites provide xine plugins and extensions as well as binary packages: http://dvd.sourceforge.net DVD tools and plugins including menu support (dvdnav). Please Note: the dvdnav plugin has been merged into the xine-lib tree, so for normal users it is no longer necessary to install any external DVD plugins. However, for encrypted DVD playback libdvdcss is needed. http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/~jcm/skyblade/ xine RPMs (including dvdnav RPMs) http://freshrpms.net xine RPMs for RedHat 7.2 and 7.3 (using d5d plugin) http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/ daily xine RPMs (RH7.x, win32 codecs RPM) http://packman.links2linux.de/ xine RPMs (Suse 7.3, i686 and ppc) http://www.amalthea.de/xine/ resources for xine and DXR3 dvd_disc_20000215.tar.gz regionset utility http://www.gekkou.co.uk precompiled Solaris/SPARC binaries http://sinek.sourceforge.net gtk+ frontend to xine http://rambo.its.tudelft.nl/~ewald/xine xine aRts plugin http://kxine.sourceforge.net KDE frontend to xine http://www.geocities.com/matthew_grooms xine for win32 sources and binaries http://www.reamined.on.ca/doconnor/xine/ xine for OS/2 sources and binaries
Disclaimer: These links are provided for your information only. The xine project team has no control over these sites and denies any responsibility for their contents.
used software
xine uses software from the following free software projects:
* liba52 by Aaron Holtzman (homepage) and Michel Lespinasse * libmpeg2 by Aaron Holtzman and Michel Lespinasse * various decoders from the ffmpeg project by Fabrice Bellard * libmad - MPEG audio decoder by Robert Leslie * FAAD2 - Freeware Advanced Audio Decoder version 2 by M. Bakker
...without these great pieces of software xine would of course not be where it is now. Also many thanks to the guys from ogle project who have provided kind support in developing all the interface needed for navigation and subtitle support.
credits
This is a very incomplete list of developers, for a complete list please see the AUTHORS file that comes with the xine tarballs. The names in brackets are SourceForge user names, just in case you need to contact one of the developers directly. If you have any questions related to xine, you should probably write to the xine-user mailing list or another one of our mailing lists.
* Günter Bartsch (guenter/gooofy) main developer * Daniel Caujolle-Bert (f1rmb) build/auto* process, alsa plugin, gui programming * Miguel Freitas (miguelfreitas) many bug and deadlock fixes, bitrate detection, soft deinterlacer, massive libwin32 updates * Juergen Keil (jkeil) solaris port and lots of bugfixes * Heiko Schaefer (heikos) FreeBSD support, Testing * Siegfried Langauf (siggi) project administration, QA, debian packages, homepage, occasional hacking * Michael Roitzsch (mroi) dxr3, many bufixes and improvements * Mike Melanson expert for exotic media formats * James Courtier-Dutton dvd navigation * Thomas Hoppe (thomas_h) initial design of new homepage * Rich Wareham DVD navigation library and initial plugin * Rocky Bernstein Plugin for enhanced VCD/SVCD capabilities (vcdx)
Feedback and any kind of help offered is greatly appreciated.