Xine

Xine is an open source, high-performance, portable and reusable multimedia playback engine and video playback application for GNU/Linux operating systems. It is also compatible with the BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X platforms.

Features at a glance

Key features include a skinnable GUI, ability to download and install new skins from the Internet, modern navigation controls, including seeking, pause, fast, slow, next/previous chapter, LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) support, On Screen Display (OSD), DVD-Video and external subtitles, as well as DVD/VCD menus.

In addition, it features audio and subtitle channel selection, Closed Caption support, settings for adjusting brightness, audio volume, contrast, hue and saturation, support for playlists, image snapshots, audio resampling, aspect ratio changing, and full screen display.

The project is comprised of the xine-lib and xine-ui packages, the latter being a graphical user interface (GUI) for the first one. xine-lib is a shared library that's easy to use, yet powerful enough to be used by many other applications for smooth video playback and video processing purposes.

Supported multimedia files formats, video drivers and protocols

While supported video file formats include MPEG, OGG Vorbis, AVI, ASF, WMV, MP4, MOV, MPV, M2V, CPK, ROQ, DV, YUV4MPEG2, SMJPEG, the application also supports the MP3, AC3, DTS, PCM, WMA, FLAC, NSF, Speex, and OGG audio file formats.

The application includes the XVideo, XShm, OpenGL, VDPAU, SDL, ASCII, Syncfb, VIDIX and pgx64 video drivers, as well as support for the OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, ESD, aRts, sndio, Irix Audio and Sun Audio sound servers.

It also supports raw TCP socket, MMS (Microsoft Media), RTSP/PNM (Real Media), HTTP, network protocols for webcasting and streaming of multimedia files. Furthermore, the DXR3 (EM8300), DVB (Digital TV) cards, Video4Linux (V4L) and WinTV-PVR 250/350 PCI multimedia hardware boards are supported.

Bottom line

All in all, Xine is a decent multimedia playback engine for the open source ecosystem. However, it doesn’t support encrypted or locked DVD-Video discs, because of legal reasons.

What is new in this release:

• Fixed opening file using menus
• Fixed exit on panel close
• Fixed deadlocks
• Fixed segfault at exit
• Fixed keymap editor deadlock

What is new in version 1.1.16.2:

• Build fixes related to ImageMagick 6.4 & later.
• Fix an error in Matroska PTS calculation.
• Some front ends hang due to the hang fixes in 1.1.16. Fix this by removing a break statement.
• Fix broken size checks in various input plugins (ref. CVE-2008-5239).
• More malloc checking (ref. CVE-2008-5240).
• Fix race conditions in gapless_switch (ref. kde bug #180339)
• Fix a possible integer overflow in the 4XM demuxer. (TKADV2009-004.txt)

What is new in version 1.1.16.1 / 0.99.5 (xine-ui):

• Fix build with older ffmpeg, both internal and in Debian 5.0.
• Add version check for CACA library and disable CACA plugin if needed.
• Fix playback of some H.264 files (broken in 1.1.16).
• Various other build & bug fixes.
• Some FAQ list updates.

What is new in version 1.1.16 / 0.99.5 (xine-ui):

• Security fixes:
• Heap overflow in Quicktime atom parsing. (CVE-2008-5234 vector 1)
• Multiple buffer overflows. (CVE-2008-5236)
• Multiple integer overflows. (CVE-2008-5237)
• Unchecked read function results. (CVE-2008-5239)
• Unchecked malloc using untrusted values. (CVE-2008-5240 vectors 3 & 4)
• Buffer indexing using an untrusted value. (CVE-2008-5243)
• Integer overflows in the ffmpeg audio decoder and the CDDA server.
• Heap buffer overflow in the ffmpeg video decoder.
• Fix reported compilation failures (with C++ programs).
• Fix CDDB access in 64-bit builds.
• Fix seeking FLV clips that don't specify the movie length in the headers.
• Support H.264 and AAC streams within FLV.
• Fix timing issues (broken audio) on mingw.
• Add ID3 tag TDRC to replace/complement the deprecated tag TYER.
• Add a new meta-tag, "Composer", and use it in the FLAC demuxer.
• Correct AAC channel ordering for multi-channel audio, at least for FLAC when using ALSA or PulseAudio. (Needs a proper fix.)
• Add position-based seeking independent from seekpoints.
• Fix some XCB Xv attribute configuration breakage.
• Add a configuration option for Xv bicubic filtering, implemented in xf86-video-ati 6.9.1.
• Recognise Xv "blitter" adaptors for port selection purposes. NOTE: you will need to remove ~/.xine/catalog.cache when upgrading from xine-lib 1.1.15 or older if you wish to use this extra option.
• Fix MMS media requests where the URI contains %-encoded characters.
• Fix two hangs related to stopping playback of broken audio streams where no audio data is sent to the output thread.
• Fix WAV demuxer to send the last frames when they don't fit perfectly into the buffer