The xine engine FAQ
Copyright (c) 2001-2008 the xine project team
__________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
General questions about xine and this document
What is the xine engine?
What's the aim and scope of this text?
My question is not yet covered here - where can I
ask for help?
How do I pronounce "xine"?
What are those xine-lib, xine-ui, gnome-xine, ...
modules in cvs for?
Where and how do I get the latest development
version?
How do I submit patches?
Why is gxine's CVS module named "gnome-xine"?
Where can I find pre-compiled binaries, e.g. RPMs?
Building and installing xine from source
What do I need to compile everything properly?
How do I compile xine?
Making your own RPM packages (xine-lib, xine-ui,
gxine)
Making your own .deb packages (xine-lib, xine-ui,
gxine)
Can I provide additional CFLAGS for compilation?
Are there binaries for my AMD K7 (Athlon(TM))
available? Can I build them?
Build problems: xine engine (xine-lib)
Build problems in frontends (gxine/xine-ui/...)
Can I install xine in my home directory (without
being root)?
How to compile xine for Windows?
Playback of various stream types
DVD Playback with xine
Can I watch Video CDs (VCDs)? SVCDS ? CD-i?
Can I watch Quicktime (.mov, .mp4) files using xine?
Real Network files/streams
Can I watch Windows Media (.asf/.wmv/.wma) files
using xine?
Can I watch Digital TV (Digital Video Broadcast)
using xine?
How do I play streams from STDIN?
How can I watch files with external AVI subtitles?
Running xine
I have a lot of dropped frames - what can I do?
Oki, xine doesn't drop frames now but video output
still is not really smooth!
I have problems when using xine on FreeBSD, Solaris,
... !
What is aalib? How do I use it in xine?
Does xine support my dxr3 / hollywood+ card?
Audio related questions
What audio drivers does xine support? OSS? Alsa?
Arts? Esd?
When I'm watching a movie, the sound effects are
much higher in volume than the voices!
When I play this stream, xine shows video but
there's no audio!
Can xine produce 4-/5-channel surround audio output?
What about ac3 output via spdif to an external ac3
decoder?
Getting SPDIF output from a SBLive 5.1 using OSS
drivers
Changing the volume with the GUI control has no
effect! What's up!?
Audio is stuttering and i see a lot of "metronom:
fixing sound card drift by -2115 pts" on the
console output
xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during
playback, especially with DVDs
Video related questions
I can hear the audio - but I don't see a picture!
I only see a blue (or green or black) video image
most of the time.
The image looks strange, it is shifted, cropped or
shows weird lines!
How can I make xine use the Xv extension and what
drivers do I need?
Some parts of my X Desktop get transparent when xine
plays the video!
How do I get Xv working with compiz?
The aspect ratio of the video is wrong!
What is the difference between discarded and skipped
frames?
My xine is runing in black and white! / I only get a
grey video output!
Which is the best video driver to use?
OSD and overlay related questions
What is this "unscaled" OSD about?
I can't see the OSD or it leaves a black box over
the image!
Why colours of overlays/subtitles seem to be
"leaking"?
Why external subtitles look so ugly?
Why subtitles can't be displayed outside the video?
What kinds of subtitle fonts does xine use?
How to create own xine subtitle fonts?
Encoding of external subtitles is bad. What is
wrong?
Error Messages: What they mean and what you can do
Starting xine crashes X, I am logged out of my
desktop!
Starting xine fails with complains about audio
drivers/devices!
"no video port found"
"Unable to open dvd drive (/dev/dvd)"
My drive doesn't work and the kernel says
"status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error
}"
"demux error! 00 00 00 (should be 0x000001)"
"audio driver 'oss' failed, using null driver
instead"
"video_out: throwing away image with pts xxx because
it's too old"
"No video plugin available to decode 'xxxxxx'."
"w32codec: decoder failed to start. Is 'xxxxxx'
installed?"
xine just crashed on me - i didn't get any error
message
__________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
General questions about xine and this document
What is the xine engine?
What's the aim and scope of this text?
My question is not yet covered here - where can I ask for
help?
How do I pronounce "xine"?
What are those xine-lib, xine-ui, gnome-xine, ... modules
in cvs for?
Where and how do I get the latest development version?
How do I submit patches?
Why is gxine's CVS module named "gnome-xine"?
Where can I find pre-compiled binaries, e.g. RPMs?
Building and installing xine from source
What do I need to compile everything properly?
How do I compile xine?
Making your own RPM packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)
Making your own .deb packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)
Can I provide additional CFLAGS for compilation?
Are there binaries for my AMD K7 (Athlon(TM)) available?
Can I build them?
Build problems: xine engine (xine-lib)
Build problems in frontends (gxine/xine-ui/...)
Can I install xine in my home directory (without being
root)?
How to compile xine for Windows?
Playback of various stream types
DVD Playback with xine
Can I watch Video CDs (VCDs)? SVCDS ? CD-i?
Can I watch Quicktime (.mov, .mp4) files using xine?
Real Network files/streams
Can I watch Windows Media (.asf/.wmv/.wma) files using
xine?
Can I watch Digital TV (Digital Video Broadcast) using
xine?
How do I play streams from STDIN?
How can I watch files with external AVI subtitles?
Running xine
I have a lot of dropped frames - what can I do?
Oki, xine doesn't drop frames now but video output still
is not really smooth!
I have problems when using xine on FreeBSD, Solaris, ... !
What is aalib? How do I use it in xine?
Does xine support my dxr3 / hollywood+ card?
Audio related questions
What audio drivers does xine support? OSS? Alsa? Arts?
Esd?
When I'm watching a movie, the sound effects are much
higher in volume than the voices!
When I play this stream, xine shows video but there's no
audio!
Can xine produce 4-/5-channel surround audio output?
What about ac3 output via spdif to an external ac3
decoder?
Getting SPDIF output from a SBLive 5.1 using OSS drivers
Changing the volume with the GUI control has no effect!
What's up!?
Audio is stuttering and i see a lot of "metronom: fixing
sound card drift by -2115 pts" on the console
output
xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback,
especially with DVDs
Video related questions
I can hear the audio - but I don't see a picture!
I only see a blue (or green or black) video image most of
the time.
The image looks strange, it is shifted, cropped or shows
weird lines!
How can I make xine use the Xv extension and what drivers
do I need?
Some parts of my X Desktop get transparent when xine plays
the video!
How do I get Xv working with compiz?
The aspect ratio of the video is wrong!
What is the difference between discarded and skipped
frames?
My xine is runing in black and white! / I only get a grey
video output!
Which is the best video driver to use?
OSD and overlay related questions
What is this "unscaled" OSD about?
I can't see the OSD or it leaves a black box over the
image!
Why colours of overlays/subtitles seem to be "leaking"?
Why external subtitles look so ugly?
Why subtitles can't be displayed outside the video?
What kinds of subtitle fonts does xine use?
How to create own xine subtitle fonts?
Encoding of external subtitles is bad. What is wrong?
Error Messages: What they mean and what you can do
Starting xine crashes X, I am logged out of my desktop!
Starting xine fails with complains about audio
drivers/devices!
"no video port found"
"Unable to open dvd drive (/dev/dvd)"
My drive doesn't work and the kernel says "status=0x51 {
DriveReady SeekComplete Error }"
"demux error! 00 00 00 (should be 0x000001)"
"audio driver 'oss' failed, using null driver instead"
"video_out: throwing away image with pts xxx because it's
too old"
"No video plugin available to decode 'xxxxxx'."
"w32codec: decoder failed to start. Is 'xxxxxx'
installed?"
xine just crashed on me - i didn't get any error message
General questions about xine and this document
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.
Since there are several frontends for the xine library
available, this document has a problem when it comes to
examples. The two most common frontends xine-ui and gxine are
mixed in command line examples throughout this FAQ. When you
use a different frontend, some of these will not work for you.
The filename of the config file also varies amongst frontends.
If you get confused, I recommend you try with one of xine-ui or
gxine.
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 usually 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 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.
How do I pronounce "xine"?
As long as people know what you are talking about, you are free
to pronounce it the way you like, but the official
pronounciation is [ksi:n], like the name "Maxine" with the "Ma"
removed.
What are those xine-lib, xine-ui, gnome-xine, ... 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
basic 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 kaffeine, sinek and totem develop
additional frontends. In the future you will likely see more
and different types of applications 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 are: xine-plugin a mozilla browser plugin
for streaming media playback using xine, 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. The CVS and Mercurial repositories are only intended
for developers and for others who know why they use it.
Checking out xine modules from Mercurial
The repositories are listed at http://hg.debian.org/hg/;
however, this is a list of all repositories which are kept
there, not just the xine project's (which are the ones which
begin with xine-lib/). To check one out:
hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/repository local_copy
e.g.
hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/xine-lib/xine-lib xine-lib
Currently, only xine-lib and gxine are present here.
Checking out xine modules from CVS
To check out xine modules from CVS, first do this:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@xine.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine logi
n
The password is empty, just press Enter.
Then, to check out individual modules (e.g. xine-lib or
xine-ui):
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@xine.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine co <
modulename>
If you want xine-lib or gxine, you should use Mercurial
instead. The CVS repositories for these are not maintained.
How do I submit patches?
First, make sure that you're using a current development
version (see above) or at least the current release version.
Then, once you're ready to send the patch...
Generate your patch using either cvs diff -u > my.patch or hg
diff > my.patch (as appropriate). Make sure that your message
subject briefly describes the patch; your message body should
contain a longer description of the patch. Your patch should be
applicable using patch -p0 -i my.patch or, preferably, patch
-p1 -i my.patch from the top-level directory in the source tree
(i.e. where configure.ac is) - this is fairly important for our
Mercurial-based repositories since it makes importing your
patch that much easier (hg import defaults to -p1).
Alternatively, if you've been hacking away at a module which is
maintained using mercurial, you can make them available as
diffs - use hg export or, if you have several patches, you
could use hg bundle instead (both require extra parameters; hg
help export and hg help bundle for more details) - or via HTTP
by using hg serve. In the latter case, you'll need to post a
URL from which a developer can pull the changes.
Patches should normally be sent to the xine-devel mailing list,
<xine-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>.
Why is gxine's CVS module named "gnome-xine"?
Historical reasons: gxine was originally named gnome-xine.
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 or use their package search tools for further
info. You can also find links to third parties providing xine
RPMs on the xine homepage at
http://www.xine-project.org/releases.
See the next section of this FAQ for instructions on how to
build xine from source.
Building and installing 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 is 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 GTK2 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. Most notably, if you want to see any video
on your X11 desktop (and that's what you're here for, isn't
it?), you need the X developer packages as well.
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?
Simple build instructions for beginners
Download the latest xine-lib and gxine/xine-ui tarballs, then
follow these instruction. To unpack a tarball, use:
tar xfvz tarballname.tar.gz
The following instructions will install xine in /usr/local
where it will be visible for all users. You need root
privileges to do this on most systems.
After unpacking xine-lib, issue:
./configure
make install
Make sure your /etc/ld.so.conf contains /usr/local/lib and
continue with:
ldconfig
Now unpack your frontend (gxine or xine-ui or ...), then:
./configure
make install
Complete build instructions
The build process is the same for all of the xine modules.
You have to start with xine-lib. If built and installed
successfully, you can continue with the frontend(s).
If you have installed xine-lib to a non-standard prefix, make
sure that you have $prefix/bin in your PATH and that your
linker finds libs in $prefix/lib - otherwise trying to build
modules that rely on xine-lib will fail with configure
complaining about not finding certain parts of libxine. Using
bash you can do something like:
export PATH="$prefix/bin:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$prefix/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
to make sure libxine can be found by the frontend(s).
Last but not least. Here the build instructions. As stated
earlier, those are the same for every xine module.
./autogen.sh [-> only if you checked your sources out of CVS]
./configure
make
make install
Making your own RPM packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)
Basically you will only have to issue one command, if you have
just downloaded a source tarball from our web site:
rpmbuild -ta <THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_SOURCE_TAR_BALL>
(Older versions of RPM use rpm instead of rpmbuild.)
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 something like
/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 rpmbuild -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.
Making your own .deb packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)
You'll need a CVS or HG snapshot tarball or source checked out
from the repository.
First, make sure that the "devscripts" package is installed.
You'll then need the following commands (the first one isn't
needed unless you're using a snapshot tarball):
tar xzf <PACKAGE-VER.tar.gz>
cd <PACKAGE-VER>
./autogen.sh noconfig
debuild binary
(If debuild complains about unmet dependencies, then install
them using aptitude install <PACKAGES> (as root) then re-run
debuild binary.
Once the build has been successfully completed, you'll have
some new .debs.
cd ..
ls *.deb
su - -c 'cd '"`pwd`"' && dpkg -i <DEB_PACKAGES>'
Ubuntu users will probably want to use this instead of that su:
sudo dpkg -i <DEB_PACKAGES>
In any case, please keep in mind that you have to build and
install xine-lib first before you can proceed with xine-ui or
gxine.
Can I provide additional CFLAGS for compilation?
Yes, you can do so by setting the CFLAGS variable and then
running configure again. You can even pass them to configure
directly. Example:
./configure CFLAGS="-march=i686"
Other user variables configure respects are:
* CC to specify the compiler executable
* CPP to specify the C preprocessor executable
* LD to specify the linker executable
* CPPFLAGS to pass additional include paths or other
preprocessor options
* LDFLAGS to pass additional library paths or other linker
options
An example combining some of these would look like:
./configure CC="/opt/intel/bin/icc" LD="/opt/intel/bin/xild" \
CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/dvdnav" LDFLAGS="-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 passing the canonical system name for your
machine to configure with the --host option, e.g.
./configure --host=k7-pc-linux-gnu
Build problems: xine engine (xine-lib)
The package doesn't compile at all!
In order to be able to compile xine-lib, you need (amongst
other things) the zlib compression library plus the appropriate
headers, which are often found in a package called zlib-devel
or similar.
Read again carefully the output ./configure produced and/or
compiler warnings and error reports, they often contain helpful
information to find out what's going on. If you're stuck here
and decide to post your problem on the xine-user mailing list,
make sure you include these outputs.
The Xv video-out plugin fails to compile!
If you want to have Xv support compiled in, make sure you
either have a shared Xv library on your system, e.g. ls
/usr/X11R6/lib/libXv* should give you some .so libs, like this:
/usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.a
/usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.so
/usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.so.1
Alternatively you need to have libtool 1.4 or newer installed,
then libXv.a is sufficient. Otherwise you can create the shared
versions yourself:
ld --whole-archive -shared -o libXv.so.1 libXv.a
ln -s libXv.so.1 libXv.so
ldconfig
Now you should be ready to build the Xv video-out plugin on
your system.
Build problems in frontends (gxine/xine-ui/...)
I have installed xine-lib but the frontend complains about not
finding it!
First of all take a closer look at the compilation instructions
above again. You will probably find your answer there right
away.
As stated there (there again that hint *grin*), make sure that
you have $prefix/bin in your path and that your linker is able
to find libraries installed in $prefix/lib By the way, $prefix
is where you installed your xine-lib to earlier (yes,
installing xine-lib with make install or installing the
corresponding distribution-provided -dev or -devel package
would be a good idea before trying to compile the frontend ;)
).
Can I install xine in my home directory (without being root)?
Sure. First set up a subdir where you install your private
software, eg.
mkdir ~/xine
Then you have to set a few environment variables - it's
probably a good idea to add this to your ~/.bashrc (or
somewhere similar):
export PATH="$HOME/xine/bin:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/xine/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
Now you can unpack tarballs e.g. in ~/xine/src (mkdir
~/xine/src if necessary) and do a
./configure --prefix=$HOME/xine
make install
You also need to tell frontends using xine-lib, where to find
it:
./configure --prefix=$HOME/xine --with-xine-prefix=$HOME/xine
How to compile xine for Windows?
For compiling xine under Windows with MinGW, CygWin or MS
Visual C see README.WIN32.
For cross-compiling xine under comfortable unix-like
environment with MinGW see README.MINGWCROSS.
Playback of various stream types
DVD Playback with xine
How do I play back DVDs with xine?
Newer xine (1.0.x) releases come with a full-featured DVD
plugin that should be able to handle any unencrypted,
non-locked DVD with full menu navigation support. No external
plugins are required anymore here.
To get DVD playback working, first make sure you have a symlink
/dev/dvd pointing to your DVD device on your system. For
example, if your DVD drive is the master ide drive on the
second IDE channel, /dev/dvd should point to /dev/hdc. Please
note that if you are using the ide-scsi emulation on your
system, it is likely that your DVD drive got mapped to a scsi
device node even though it is an ide drive. In that case first
check out you boot/kernel logs (or run cdrecord -scanbus) to
find out which device it got mapped to and set the symlink
accordingly (should be something like /dev/scd0, /dev/scd1, ...
in that case). Also make sure you (as a user) have sufficient
(read and write) permissions on your DVD drive. This could mean
you either have to change the device permissions or add your
user to a special group (e.g. addgroup cdrom username),
depending on your setup and/or distribution.
It is highly recommended to switch DMA mode on for your DVD
drive (without it even very recent machines will have trouble
producing smooth video output). Use a command like hdparm -d 1
<device> on your DVD device. Please note that even if you're
using ide-scsi you will have to set the dma flag on the ide
device node (e.g. /dev/hdc), not the mapped /dev/scd scsi
device.
To be able to play back encrypted DVDs you need to have
libdvdcss installed on your system (please check if this is
legal where you live). If you do not understand what the term
"encrypted DVD" means here: As a rule of thumb, every DVD you
have to pay money for is most likely encrypted.
To make matters worse, apart from encryption, there is another
obstacle to take: the region code. The DVD authorities decided
to divide the world into eight geographical regions. Have a
look at http://www.dvdforum.gr.jp/RegionMap.pdf if you want to
know which number has been assigned to your country. It is now
their idea, that you shall only play DVDs, which have been
produced for your region. If you take a DVD off the shelf in
your local store, you should find a little globe-like icon
which shows the region code the disc is for.
Newer (post-2000) DVD drives (so-called RPC-2 drives) check the
DVD region, which means they'll prevent you from playing back
DVDs that have a different region code from what the drive is
set up for. Some drives come with a factory setting of region 0
so they can play back any DVD until a region code is set.
Others refuse to play any DVD at all until they are told a
region. The easiest way to handle this is to use the regionset
utility from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31346&rel
ease_id=168415 .
Once you have everything set up, try something like gxine dvd:/
or xine -p dvd:/ to start dvd playback. Some frontend also
offer so-called autoplay buttons or menu entries that start dvd
playback immediately.
Important: do not try to mount the DVD. Just insert it and hit
the DVD autoplay button or start xine from the command line.
If things do not work as expected, try running the xine-check
shellscript that comes with xine to see if this gives you
further hints on what could be wrong.
DVD playback works, but it takes a long time until playback starts
This points to a region code problem. Some versions of
libdvdcss can play back DVDs from other regions than the RPC-2
DVD drive is set up for, but this usually means a cryptographic
attack (which takes time) has to be used to access the DVD.
You can download a tool to set the region code of RPC-Drives
here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31346&rel
ease_id=168415 .
Warning: Please be aware that the number of region code changes
in RPC-2 drives is limited (usually about 5 times), after that
your drive will stay locked to the region you last set it up
for.
I have problems setting up my RPC-2 drive for the right region!
You can download a tool to set the region code of RPC-Drives
here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31346&rel
ease_id=168415 .
Warning: Please be aware that the number of region code changes
in RPC-2 drives is limited (usually about 5 times), after that
your drive will stay locked to the region you last set it up
for.
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:/ or xine vcd:/ from the command line.
VideoCD troubleshooting guide
This gives higher-level troubleshooting. More lower-level
information is given in the next section.
* When you open the configuration dialog of your frontend,
you should see a vcd config section. An important setting
is default_device. If this is set to the empty string, the
VCD plugin will try to scan your drives for a suitable
device if the driver has the capability to scan for drives.
However you can set the device to something of your
choosing. On GNU/Linux, this may be /dev/cdrom and on
Solaris it may be /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0.
If you set this field, make sure these are correct for your
particular setup. For example, I generally play out of the
DVD device and this is called /dev/dvd rather than
/dev/cdrom.
* Your frontend should offer a VCD autoscan button or menu
item. If you select this, you should see your CD disk light
go on if you have one. And the CD should be read. You
should get a playlist of what's on the VideoCD.
If not something's wrong, possibly you configured the wrong
drive. You might try to read a disk image of a VideoCD and
thus elimate any problems with hardware. You can get a test
VideoCD disk image to test here:
http://www.vcdimager.org/pub/vcdimager/examples/test_svcd/t
est_svcd_pal.zip . After unzipping this there should be
files test_svcd_pal.cue and test_svcd_pal.bin. Run xine
with the MRL vcd:/test_svcd_pal.cue:E0. If you see
something playing then this is a hardware problem. You
might also want to try starting playback-control with
vcd:/test_svcd_pal.cue:P1.
* There should be at least one "track", and one "entry"
listed for the VideoCD and the names of these in the MRL
list will end with "T1" and "E0" respectively. Often there
are other playlist items, and if you have menus or still
frames there will be "segments" as well. The simplest
things to check are probably "entries" and "tracks". If
there are no entries listed or none of the tracks or
entries play, then there may be a problem with that
particular medium. So as in the step above, you can try a
known good sample and perhaps burn a CD from that. More
likely if you get this far, some of the items listed work
and some do not. There are a number of debugging switches
that you can dynamically turn on and off that may be able
to help in isolating more specific problems. See the
section below.
* Something plays now, but you do not get any menus? Well,
first is there supposed to be a menu? In the last step you
should have seen what is on the VideoCD. Still frames are
always "segments" so see if you can find one in the MRL
list and select that.
If there are no segments listed, there aren't any
still-frame menus. It's also possible to have menus in
looping MPEG's. Use the vcddump tool to find loops. vcddump
is also part of VCDImager. Another program that can help
you examine the contents of a VideoCD is vcdxrip.
To troubleshoot, start out with the known SVCD example that
has a still-frame menu at the beginning:
http://www.vcdimager.org/pub/vcdimager/examples/test_svcd/t
est_svcd_pal.zip Inside this is a largish file called
test_svcd_pal.bin and another short text file called
test_svcd_ntsc.cue. These are CD disk images; that is,
something that could be burned to a CD drive such as with
cdrdao. However you don't have to create a CD to view these
with the xine VCD plugin. You should be able to play the
VideoCD by running the MRL vcd:/test_svcd_pal.cue. If you
see a still frame on startup. Great! If instead you see
what looks like the beginning of a movie (Blue Streak with
Martin Lawrence) then go to the next step.
* You have a VideoCD with menu and can see it, but there is
no menu on startup? If you have the VideoCD from the last
step, then run the MRL vcd:/test_svcd_pal.cue:P1 If this
shows a still frame, but it just does not show when you hit
either the "VCD" autoscan button or give a MRL without the
P1 at the end then go to the next step.
If you have another VideoCD, from the MRL list, you should
also see "playlist" entries. Try selecting the one that
ends "P1". If you don't see an entry with P1, then your
VideoCD does not have playback control (PBC) and although
there may be a still frame on the VideoCD it may have been
authored so it is not easily accessed. Again vcddump or
vcdxrip can help here.
* You have a VideoCD with menu at beginning and can see it
using an MRL with P1 at the end, but you want to see it by
hitting the "VCD" autoscan button as well? Check to see
that you have the configuration entry media.vcd.autoplay
set to playlist.
VideoCD debugging
To facilitate tracking down problems we let you see what's
going on dynamically. Various debugging settings will cause
output to appear on xine's plugin log and/or on standard error
output. See the config entry media.vcd.debug for details.
The tool vcd-info from the cdio branch of vcdimager can be used
to show the entire contents of a VideoCD or selected portions
of that. Until the cdio branch of vcdimager is completely
merged with vcdimager, the cd-info branch version has a few
more features. (However consult vcdimager for complete version
of the program.)
vcdxrip can be used to extract portions of a VideoCD and or
create an XML description file of the VideoCD. This XML file
and the extracted files can be used by vcdxbuild to recreate
another VideoCD.
And finally see also tools cd-info and cd-read from libcdio.
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, some
quicktime audio/video codecs are not 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://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . The package is
called "essential". Unpack it and move everything you find
inside to /usr/lib/codecs (actually you can place them anywhere
you want, e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then
you'll have to set decoder.external.win32_codecs_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 Real (.rm, .ram) files using xine?
The situation with real files and streams is pretty similar to
the situation with Quicktime Streams (see above). The newer
real audio and video formats are only supported by using
binary-only codecs which are not included in xine.
Possibly the most convenient way to get the Real codecs is to
install RealPlayer 9 or RealPlayer 10 and set the
decoder.external.real_codecs_path in your xine config file to
the name of the directory which contains the codecs (look for
drvc.so); it's probably something like
/opt/real/RealPlayer/codecs/. Restart xine then and you should
be able to watch Real files/streams.
Another way to get the Real codecs is to download them from the
MPlayer website http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html .
The package is called "essential". Unpack it and move
everything you find inside to /usr/lib/codecs and set the
decoder.external.real_codecs_path in your xine config file to
/usr/lib/codecs (actually you can place them anywhere you want,
e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then you'll have to
set decoder.external.real_codecs_path accordingly). Restart
xine then and you should be able to watch Real files/streams.
What about (live) network streams (pnm://, rtsp:// style urls)?
xine supports both pnm and rtsp streaming. However, digging out
the actual pnm/rtsp url can be tricky as they're often packed
into heavy JavaScript and HTML code on most websites. You can
either use a combination of your browser's "save source"
function and wget or use a xine browser plugin (currently the
gxine frontend comes with a simple mozilla plugin, for
example). When you decided to dig out the url by hand don't get
fooled by the many redirectors that are often placed around the
actual url. Use wget to download any http://-style urls and use
less to look inside the downloaded .ra/.ram files where you
will find the actual pnm/rtsp url which can be opened using
xine.
Can I watch Windows Media (.asf/.wmv/.wma) files using xine?
While the container format (system layer) ASF (wmv is just an
alias) is fully supported in xine, for newer windows media 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://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . The package is
called "essential". Unpack it and move everything you find
inside to /usr/lib/codecs (actually you can place them anywhere
you want, e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then
you'll have to set decoder.external.win32_codecs_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 a special MRL construction like:
xine file://path/to/test.mpg#subtitle:/path/to/file.sub
The external subtitles support can also be used by any xine
frontend. Currently xine-ui and kaffeine implement this feature
with a subtitle selection dialog.
Running xine
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
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 perfo
rmance)
[ 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 your graphics card does image scaling
and colourspace 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:
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 X.org or 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 X.org or 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.ht
ml .
* Use the latest or a known-good gcc version and build an
optimized xine-lib for your architecture.
* 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
the actual performance gain during playback is very small
if any, but since raw devices are bypassing the kernel's
buffer cache, Linux will not try to cache the DVDs you
play. This would not be useful, because xine does its own
caching and you usually play DVDs sequentially, which means
you won't reuse anything from the cache. But the problem
would be that Linux throws everything out of the cache that
might be in there.
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/
For recent kernels (2.6.x series) the raw devices are
neither needed nor supported anymore, so don't bother.
To use raw devices, first connect a free raw device to your
dvd device, use something like:
raw /dev/raw1 /dev/dvd
Then create a link named "rdvd" pointing to that raw
device:
ln -s raw1 /dev/rdvd
* For slow / high-latency dvd drives it might help to
increase the number of video buffers xine allocates. Try
setting engine.buffers.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).
Linux 2.5/2.6 will probably have these improvements out of the
box.
Miguel Freitas has written a nice article about his kernel
multimedia experiments .
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.
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).
Audio related questions
What audio drivers does xine support? OSS? Alsa? Arts? Esd?
Currently xine support audio output via OSS (Linux 2.4 and most
*BSD audio drivers), ALSA 0.9 and 1.0 (ALSA 0.5.x is no longer
supported), aRTs (KDE 3's sound daemon), ESounD (esd, gnome's
sound daemon not recommended because it has serious issues with
a/v sync), JACK, PulseAudio, plus platform-specific output
through Sun devices for Solaris and NetBSD and Irix output.
When I'm watching a movie, the sound effects are much higher in
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 your frontend does not have such a compression slider,
you can pass the value with the MRL:
xine dvd:/#compression:150
* If you have a dolby digital (AC3) soundtrack, you can try
to enable liba52's dynamic range compression setting
audio.a52.dynamic_range: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!
If this happens with any video, 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. 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
.config/gxine or .xine:
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.0
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.1
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 5.1
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 or
~/.config/gxine/config) yourself:
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through
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.
Requirements
1. xine-lib >= 1.x.x
2. OSS driver
3. an external decoder
4. a cable to connect the SBLive to the external decoder
The configuration described was tested using a Soundblaster
live 5.1 (rev 7) with a Yamaha DSP-AX620 external decoder.
Retrieving the driver
The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded
at http://opensource.creative.com/. The driver package contains
documentation on how to install it. Besides that I'd like to
add the following notes.
In order to compile and install these drivers, you need a valid
kernel configuration file. For RedHat Linux's pre-compiled
kernels these configuration files can be found in
/usr/src/linux/configs. After you've located the correct config
file for your kernel, you need to copy it to
/usr/src/linux/.config For example, when you run the
2.4.18-i686 kernel do :
cp /usr/src/linux/configs/kernel-2.4.18-i686.config /usr/src/linux/.c
onfig
Make sure that the emu10k1 module that is currently installed
is not loaded. To unload the modules:
/sbin/modprobe -rv emu10k1.o ac97_codec.o
If this mentions that the device is busy, some program is using
the driver. Some example could be a mixer application or sound
daemon like artsd. You'll need to close down the applications
before continuing. At success it should print something like:
# delete emu10k1
# delete ac97_codec
# delete soundcore
Run make in the directory where you unpacked the driver and
follow the instructions printed at the end of each step. The
last step should be:
make install-tools
As the README of the driver package mentions the SPDIF AC3
output doesn't work by default. In the directory utils/scripts
an emu10k1.conf file can be found which need to be placed in
the default installation directory (/usr/local/etc). After this
the emu10k1.conf needs to be modified. The following settings
worked fine for me (I don't use the analog outputs of the
card):
CARD_IS_5_1=yes
USE_DIGITAL_OUTPUT=yes
ENABLE_TONE_CONTROL=yes
AC3PASSTHROUGH=yes
ENABLE_LIVEDRIVE_IR=no
INVERT_REAR=no
MULTICHANNEL=yes
ROUTE_ALL_TO_SUB=no
ANALOG_FRONT_BOOST=no
SURROUND=no
PROLOGIC=no
ENABLE_CD_Spdif=yes
ENABLE_OPTICAL_SPDIF=no
ENABLE_LINE2_MIC2=no
ENABLE_RCA_SPDIF=no
ENABLE_RCA_AUX=no
After modifying the emu10k1.conf, you need to modify your
/etc/modules.conf and make sure the following lines are in
there.
alias sound-slot-0 emu10k1
post-install emu10k1 /usr/local/etc/emu-script
After saving the changes to modules.conf, run
/sbin/depmod -a
Now, you're ready to load the new modules and set the correct
options for it. To load the modules run:
/sbin/modprobe emu10k1
Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3 passthrough) output
You can either use the config dialog of your frontend or edit
the config file (~/.xine/config) yourself:
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through
In case the setting is not in the file you can add it.
The cable used for the SBLive can easily be self-made or buy a stereo
3.5mm jack to dual RCA cable.
What you need to make the cable yourself:
* stereo 3.5mm jack plug
* RCA plug
* shielded cable (video coax 75 Ohm will do)
Connect them as follows :
center pin jackplug ------|----- center pin RCA plug
GND __|__ GND
In order to test it use a DVD with AC3 or DTS track start xine
and select the right audio track from user interface or start
xine as:
xine dvd:/1 -a 0
The external decoder should display something like "Dolby
Digital" in case the selected audio track contains AC3 data or
"DTS" in case the selected audio track contains DTS data. Of
course stereo audio also goes through the SPDIF output, so the
analog outputs of the SBLive 5.1 are not needed anymore.
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.synchronization.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.synchronization.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 - chrony, 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.
Video related questions
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 questions.
I only see a blue (or green or black) video image most of the time.
You are either watching a very boring video (just kidding) or
you are suffering from a bug in the Xorg 6.7 implementation of
X11.
The workaround is to add the line
Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"
in the Device section of your X server configuration (usually
/etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config).
The image looks strange, it is shifted, cropped or shows weird lines!
This points to a problem with the Xv extension, which is used
by xine to display the video image. To verify this, try running
xine with the XShm video output plugin:
xine -V XShm
If that works fine, you just proved, that the Xv extension is
buggy. xine will remember the last used video output plugin, so
the setting will stay at XShm. You could simply continue using
this, but XShm is a lot slower than Xv, so read on and see if
you can get it working. Usually you should look for updated
versions of the X driver module that belongs to your graphics
card.
Other possibilites are limitations in either your X driver
module or your graphics hardware. If your card could somehow be
running out of ressources (graphics RAM perhaps) and displays
an incorrect Xv overlay because of that, try reducing the
display resolution and/or colour depth.
Consult the next question for more details on Xv.
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
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 X.org or XFree 4.x. Once you got
that you have to make sure the X 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 to
X.org or XFree 4.1.0 or later.
* 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
http://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 colours on your GUI match the colour key which
Xv uses. You can change the colour key value to avoid this.
There should be a line like:
video.device.xv_colorkey:2110
in your ~/.xine/config file where you can change the colour
that's used by xine for the video overlay.
How do I get Xv working with compiz?
Tell xine to prefer textured video. There should be a line
like:
video.device.xv_preferred_method:Any
in your ~/.xine/config file where you can change the preferred
method used by xine for the video overlay.
It may be that your graphics card or driver doesn't have the
necessary support for textured video, or the video is rendered
too slowly.
* ATI: you are likely to need xf86-video-ati later than
6.8.0; 6.9.0.91 or newer is recommended for slower/older
hardware (< X1300) because the rendering speed has been
improved a lot.
* Intel: 945 and later, at least, should be fine with
xf86-video-intel 2.0 or later. Certainly with 2.2 or later.
* nVidia: will probably be fine. (FIXME)
If you find that textured video is significantly slower or
isn't supported, you should either not use compiz or tell xine
to use the xshm video output driver.
The aspect ratio of the video is wrong!
Usually xine discovers the screen aspect ratio by querying the
X-server and then adjusts the video automatically to make it
look right. However, if that doesn't work try pressing "a" to
manually change the aspect ratio.
If you have a wide screen monitor, make sure the X-server is
correctly configured. The X-server must know the physical size
of the screen, which is independent of the resolution being
used.
For X.org, the screen size should be set in the "Monitor"
section in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as in the example
below:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "DDC Probed Monitor - ViewSonic G773-2"
DisplaySize 320 240
HorizSync 30.0 - 70.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 180.0
EndSection
For XFree86, the filename is normally /etc/X11/XF86Config.
Where DisplaySize specifies, in millimeters, the physical size
of the monitor's picture area.
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 latter 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 grey 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 supports several video drivers for outputing the image.
These will differ on how the frames are copied to the video
card memory, whether colourspace 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 or kernel helper). 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.
OSD and overlay related questions
What is this "unscaled" OSD about?
Since version 1-rc3 of xine-lib supports a new method for
rendering OSD (On Screen Display) and subtitles. This method
uses a X11 extension called XShape that allows using screen
resolution instead of stream resolution. It is called
"unscaled" OSD because it does not scales with the video being
played.
Suppose you are watching a 320x200 video in full screen. Normal
OSD would be blended at 320x200 and then scaled to full screen
(lets say, 1024x768), resulting in big and ugly fonts. The
unscaled overlay is drawn directly to screen, creating a
sharper and better looking OSD.
There are side effects too. Sometimes the unscaled overlay show
some glitch just before disappearing. Some people may be
annoyed enough by that and might want to disable the usage of
unscaled overlay altogether.
Unscaled OSD usage by subtitles and xine-ui is controlled by
the following settings (~/.xine/config or
~/.config/gxine/config):
gui.osd_use_unscaled:0
subtitles.separate.use_unscaled_osd:0
I can't see the OSD or it leaves a black box over the image!
If you are using xine-lib version 1-rc3 or newer, this is
probably due buggy XV drivers that do not support unscaled OSD
(the XShape extension) properly.
There have being reports of some ATI drivers that don't allow
displaying anything over the video. The VIA Epia binary drivers
is reported to leave a black box where the OSD was displayed.
The problem may be fixed by either updating the video driver,
or disabling xine unscaled OSD support.
Why colours of overlays/subtitles seem to be "leaking"?
xine blends most overlays, specially the ones from DVD discs,
directly over the image (scaled OSD). Unfortunately most codecs
(like MPEG2) use a subsampled image format (YV12) that makes
properly blending an interesting challenge.
In short, this is a known xine bug. There have being
discussions on improving the blending quality but, so far,
nobody implemented a better (scaled) overlay renderer. Contact
developers if you want to try doing something about it.
Why external subtitles look so ugly?
You are probably using a xine-lib version older than 1-rc3. Try
upgrading your copy and read the section about unscaled osd.
Why subtitles can't be displayed outside the video?
It is possible, but older xine versions may not support it.
There are two alternatives for rendering the subtitles outside
the video image:
* Use the "expand" post plugin to increase frame height
adding black bars to it. This will allow blending the
subtitles over the black bars, since they will be part of
the video now.
* Use unscaled OSD, as it does not requires any video to
render the subtitles on.
Also notice that DVD overlays (including subtitles) are meant
to be displayed in a fixed position, this is how the DVD menu
highlighting works. xine does not support moving them.
What kinds of subtitle fonts does xine use?
xine can use two kinds of fonts:
* TTF fonts
If xine is compiled with freetype library xine recognizes
and uses TTF fonts directly.
* xine fonts
This is xine's native format. It's better because the font
generator utility implements more features than the "on the
fly" TTF renderer.
The font for text subtitles is selected via config option
subtitles.separate.font. You can specify xine font name (sans,
serif, ...) or file name of the TTF font. The directories
$prefix/share/xine/libxine1/fonts and ~/.xine/fonts are
searched for the fonts, with $prefix being the place xine-lib
was installed to. Usually this is /usr/local or /usr. TTF fonts
are also searched for in the current directory.
How to create own xine subtitle fonts?
xine's native subtitle fonts can be generated from TTF fonts
with the utility xine-fontconv. It isn't compiled and installed
by default but you can make it manually. You'll need freetype
and zlib packages together with their versions for development
plus a compiler, of course ;) Here's how you build
xine-fontconv:
* Get the source of xine-fontconv utility from the misc
directory within the xine-lib sources.
* Compile it:
gcc xine-fontconv.c -o xine-fontconv `freetype-config --cflags --libs
` -lz
You'll need some TTF font for generating. Characters in this
font should cover all codepages you want supported, otherwise
you'll have missing characters.
Syntax is:
./xine-fontconf font.ttf font_name [encoding1 [encoding2 [...]]]
For example default font sans was generated with following
command:
./xine-fontconv Aril_Bold.ttf sans iso-8859-1 iso-8859-2 iso-8859-5 \
iso-8859-9 iso-8859-15 cp1250 cp12
51
There are displayed messages about missing characters on the
screen during generating. It's OK if the missing characters are
U+007f..U+009F. These characters come from iso-8859-1 and they
aren't displayable.
Encoding of external subtitles is bad. What is wrong?
The encoding of the external subtitles is expected to be
iso-8859-1 by default. You need to set an appropriate encoding
in the config option subtitles.separate.src_encoding. Note that
you also need a font which contains all characters from the
given encoding.
The default font sans and fonts serif and mono cover these
encodings:
* iso-8859-1
* iso-8859-2
* iso-8859-5
* iso-8859-9
* iso-8859-15
* windows-1250
* windows-1251
Error Messages: What they mean and what you can do
Starting xine crashes X, I am logged out of my desktop!
xine itself is unable to crash X, so when your X server just
shuts down or restarts with the login screen, there is
something wrong with your X setup. Most common are problems
with the Xv extension. Try running xine with the XShm video
output plugin:
xine -V XShm
If that works fine, you just proved, that the Xv extension is
buggy. xine will remember the last used video output plugin, so
the setting will stay at XShm. You could simply continue using
this, but XShm is a lot slower than Xv, so consult the section
on Xv and see if you can get it working. Usually you should
look for updated versions of the X driver module that belongs
to your graphics card.
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 DVDs).
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...
ln -s hdc /dev/dvd
... should do the job. Also make sure you have read and write
access on the device the symlink points to. See the dvd
playback section for more information.
My drive doesn't work and the kernel says "status=0x51 { DriveReady
SeekComplete Error }"
This error can be fixed by recompiling your kernel with the
option "Use multi-mode by default" enabled in the IDE settings.
"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 lose 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 is shown from time to time when
playing a DVD or CD, it's very likely that DMA is not enabled
for your drive.
"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 bug tracker:
* 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 X upgrade which
fixes this for the Savage driver. If that works for you,
please notify the xine crew at
<xine-user@lists.sourceforge.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 bug tracker 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.
distrib
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Mandriva
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2009.1
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x86_64
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media
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contrib-backports
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by-pkgid
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413f23fb5ef4d08d8023acb83c5af1b9
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files
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