The xine engine FAQ

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

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.

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 ;) ).

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.

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_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/test_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 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 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.