The xine engine FAQ list

   Copyright © 2001-2010 the xine project team
     __________________________________________________________
     __________________________________________________________

   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, gxine, ... Mercurial
                repositories for?

        Where and how do I get the latest development version?
        Don't you use CVS?
        How do I submit patches?
        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, gxine, ... Mercurial repositories
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
   three frontends being developed in the xine project: xine-ui, a
   skinned dvd-player style frontend directly based on xlib;
   gxine, a desktop media-player style frontend using the standard
   GTK widget set; and xine-plugin, a plugin for browsers such as
   Firefox. 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 repositories include xine-project-www, which contains the
   xine project website sources, and various packaging and
   development branches.

Where and how do I get the latest development version?

   Be advised that end-users should stick to the official xine
   releases. The Mercurial repositories are only intended for
   developers and for others who know why they use it.

   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

   You can see a full list of repositories by visiting
   http://hg.debian.org/hg/xine-lib/.

Don't you use CVS?

   We used to, but there are some significant problems with CVS.
   Merging is easier with Mercurial (and, for that matter, git);
   and we can commit changes locally, change them if mistakes have
   been made, then make them public whenever we're ready.

How do I submit patches?

   See the xine Hackers' Guide, chapter 3, "How to contribute".
   (This is available online at
   http://www.xine-project.org/hackersguide#contribute.)

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 Mercurial, 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're building from hg]
   ./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 an up-to-date hg repository, 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 an HG snapshot tarball or source checked out from
   the repository.

   First, make sure that the "devscripts" and "build-essential"
   packages are 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.
