The xine engine FAQ

   Copyright © 2001-2003 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, gxine, ... modules in cvs
                      for?

              Where and how do I get the latest development version?
              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)
              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)?

        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!

              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 gray
                      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 colors 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 XFree, 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, ... 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.
   CVS is only intended for developers and for others who know why they
   use it.

   To check out xine-modules from CVS, first do this:
   cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sf.net:/cvsroot/xine login

   The password is empty, just press Enter.

   Then, to check out individual modules (e.g. xine-lib, gxine or
   xine-ui):
   cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sf.net:/cvsroot/xine co <modulename>
     _________________________________________________________________

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 for further
   info. You can also find links to third parties providing xine RPMs on
   the xine homepage at http://xinehq.de/index.php/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 GTK 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 XFree 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)

   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.
     _________________________________________________________________

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 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
     _________________________________________________________________

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&release_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&release_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&release_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/test_svc
       d_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/test_svc
       d_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 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 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://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ . The package is
   called "QuickTime6 DLLs". Unpack it and move everything you find
   inside to /usr/lib/win32 (actually you can place them anywhere you
   want, e.g. someplace in your homedirectory, but then you'll have to
   set codec.win32_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
   available from real networks but are not included in xine.

   One way to get these codecs is to download and install RealPlayer from
   RealNetworks, for example in /usr/local/RealPlayer8 or
   /opt/RealPlayer8. If you installed it in one of these places, xine
   should automatically find and use the real binary codecs. If it
   doesn't work, try to find out the exact path to where the real codecs
   are installed on your system (look for a file named rv30.so.6.0 which
   should reside in a directory called Codecs in the directory where you
   have installed RealPlayer in) and set codec.real_codecs_path in your
   xine config file accordingly.
     _________________________________________________________________

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://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ . The package is
   called "Win32 Codecpack". Unpack it and move everything you find
   inside to /usr/lib/win32 (actually you can place them anywhere you
   want, e.g. someplace in your homedirectory, but then you'll have to
   set codec.win32_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 test.mpg#subtitle: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 performance)
   [ 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
       colorspace 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 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 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.html .
     * 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/
       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
       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 (kernel audio drivers),
   ALSA 0.9.x (ALSA 0.5.x is no longer supported), arts (KDE's sound
   daemon) and esound (esd, gnome's sound daemon - not recommended
   because it has serious issues with a/v sync).
     _________________________________________________________________

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
       codec.a52_dynrng: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 .gxine or .xine:
   audio.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.0
   audio.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.1
   audio.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 ~/.gxine/config) yourself:
   audio.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/.config

   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.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.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.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
   - chronny, 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 XFree driver
   module that belongs to your graphics card.

   Other possibilites are limitations in either your XFree 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 XFree 4.x. Once you got that you have to
   make sure the XFree 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 at least to
       XFree 4.1.0
     * 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 colors on your GUI match the colorkey Xv uses. You can
   change the colorkey value to avoid this. There should be a line like:
   video.XV_COLORKEY:2110

   in your ~/.xine/config file where you can change the color that's used
   by xine for the video overlay.
     _________________________________________________________________

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 XFree86 the screen size should be set with the file
   /etc/X11/XF86Config, under the section "Monitor" 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

   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 gray 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 support several video drivers for outputing the image. These will
   differ on how the frames are copied to the video card memory, whether
   colorspace 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) and SyncFB (requires
   kernel helper - Matrox only). 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 ~/.gxine/config):
   gui.osd_use_unscaled:0
   misc.spu_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 colors 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
   misc.spu_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 cp1251

   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
   misc.spu_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 XFree, I am logged out of my desktop!

   xine itself is unable to crash XFree, 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
   XFree 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 loose 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 shows from time to time playing dvd/cdrom, it's very
   likely that your drive is not DMA enabled.
     _________________________________________________________________

"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-user mailing list:

     * 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 XFree 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 user mailing list
       <xine-user@lists.sourceforge.net> 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.
