# The xine engine FAQ

Copyright © 2001-2008 the xine project team

## General questions about xine and this document

### What is the xine engine?

The xine engine is a free media player engine. It comes in the form of a shared libarary and is typically used by media player frontends and other multimedia applications for playback of multimedia streams such as movies, radio/tv network streams, DVDs, VCDs.

Since there are several frontends for the xine library available, this document has a problem when it comes to examples. The two most common frontends xine-ui and gxine are mixed in command line examples throughout this FAQ. When you use a different frontend, some of these will not work for you. The filename of the config file also varies amongst frontends. If you get confused, I recommend you try with one of xine-ui or gxine.

### What's the aim and scope of this text?

The primary goal of this FAQ is to cover all recurring questions related to the xine engine. Frontend specific questions are usually not covered here.

### My question is not yet covered here – where can I ask for help?

First of all be sure that your question is really not covered here and that you haven't just been a bit too lazy to read through all of this text. ;-). Also check out the documentation specific to the frontend (e.g. xine-ui or gxine or totem).

That said – you are welcome to mail to our user mailing list: `<xine-user@lists.sourceforge.net>` Please provide some info about your setup so people have a chance to help you, e.g. include information about your audio/video hardware and drivers you use, operating system, cpu type and some console output/any error messages. Also include command line parameters you have specified and information about the type of stream you're trying to play back. Also very important is the version of xine you're using and information about any additional plugins you may have installed on your system.

### How do I pronounce "xine"?

As long as people know what you are talking about, you are free to pronounce it the way you like, but the official pronounciation is [ksi:n], like the name "Maxine" with the "Ma" removed.

### What are those xine-lib, xine-ui, gnome-xine, … modules in cvs for?

Some time ago xine just became too complex to be just one big program. Therefore it was split into two major parts.

xine-lib is simply speaking the engine of xine. It contains all basic plugins and is necessary to run anything that relies on xine. (This is the part that is covered in this FAQ.)

Then there are frontends – applications that use xine. The most common frontend is that of a media player. There are currently two frontends being developed in the xine project, xine-ui (skinned dvd-player style frontend directly based on xlib) and gxine, a desktop media-player style frontend using the standard gtk widget set and comes with a mozilla browser plugin. External projects like kaffeine, sinek and totem develop additional frontends. In the future you will likely see more and different types of applications being developed which will use the xine engine for video processing and other multimedia purposes.

If you simply want a media/dvd player, you'll need to install xine-lib first and then choose and install a player frontend like xine-ui or gxine.

Other modules in CVS are: `xine-plugin` a mozilla browser plugin for streaming media playback using xine, `xine_www` the xine project website sources.

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

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

#### Checking out xine modules from Mercurial

The repositories are listed at http://hg.debian.org/hg/; however, this is a list of all repositories which are kept there, not just the xine project's (which are the ones which begin with `xine-lib/`). To check one out:

       hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/repository local_copy

e.g.

       hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/xine-lib/xine-lib xine-lib

Currently, only xine-lib and gxine are present here.

#### Checking out xine modules from CVS

To check out xine modules from CVS, first do this:

       cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@xine.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine login

The password is empty, just press Enter.

Then, to check out individual modules (e.g. `xine-lib` or `xine-ui`):

       cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@xine.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine co <modulename>

If you want xine-lib or gxine, you should use Mercurial instead. The CVS repositories for these are not maintained.

### How do I submit patches?

First, make sure that you're using a current development version (see above) or at least the current release version. Then, once you're ready to send the patch…

Generate your patch using either cvs diff -u > my.patch or hg diff > my.patch (as appropriate). Make sure that your message subject briefly describes the patch; your message body should contain a longer description of the patch. Your patch should be applicable using patch -p0 -i my.patch or, preferably, patch -p1 -i my.patch from the top-level directory in the source tree (i.e. where configure.ac is) – this is fairly important for our Mercurial-based repositories since it makes importing your patch that much easier (hg import defaults to -p1).

Alternatively, if you've been hacking away at a module which is maintained using mercurial, you can make them available as diffs – use hg export or, if you have several patches, you could use hg bundle instead (both require extra parameters; hg help export and hg help bundle for more details) – or via HTTP by using hg serve. In the latter case, you'll need to post a URL from which a developer can pull the changes.

Patches should normally be sent to the xine-devel mailing list, `<xine-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>`.

### Why is gxine's CVS module named "gnome-xine"?

Historical reasons: gxine was originally named gnome-xine.

### Where can I find pre-compiled binaries, e.g. RPMs?

The xine project does not provide pre-compiled binaries for legal reasons (some parts of xine may be covered by patents in some countries). Some OS projects/vendors (e.g. Debian, FreeBSD, …) offer binaries for their distributions – please contact them or use their package search tools for further info. You can also find links to third parties providing xine RPMs on the xine homepage at http://www.xine-project.org/releases.

See the next section of this FAQ for instructions on how to build xine from source.

## Building and installing xine from source

### What do I need to compile everything properly?

First of all an official and stable release of gcc. Also be aware that patched gcc versions may break parts of xine and are therefore not supported by the xine project.

Furthermore you'll have to use GNU make to compile xine. On most GNU/Linux systems "make" is GNU make – on other platforms use "gmake" instead. Also, zlib is required (including the appropriate header files, which are often found in a package called zlib-devel or similar.)

If you want to compile xine from CVS, you'll need to have the autobuild tools installed (automake, autoconf and libtool – in recent versions).

Frontends might need additional libraries, e.g. for gxine you'll need to have GTK2 installed. Make sure you have not only the shared libraries themselves but also the header files (often packaged seperately as so-called -dev packages) on your system.

Some plugins that come with the xine engine need additional libraries (otherwise they will not be built). For example, libogg and libvorbis (plus their include files) are needed for ogg/vorbis support. Most notably, if you want to see any video on your X11 desktop (and that's what you're here for, isn't it?), you need the X developer packages as well.

Don't worry about this too much right now, xine's configure (see below) will check for all the stuff needed and will tell you what's missing (which means that you should check the output it produces carefully ;) ).

### How do I compile xine?

#### Simple build instructions for beginners

Download the latest xine-lib and gxine/xine-ui tarballs, then follow these instruction. To unpack a tarball, use:

       tar xfvz tarballname.tar.gz

The following instructions will install xine in `/usr/local` where it will be visible for all users. You need root privileges to do this on most systems.

After unpacking xine-lib, issue:

       ./configure
       make install

Make sure your `/etc/ld.so.conf` contains `/usr/local/lib` and continue with:

       ldconfig

Now unpack your frontend (gxine or xine-ui or …), then:

       ./configure
       make install

#### Complete build instructions

The build process is the same for all of the xine modules.

You have to start with xine-lib. If built and installed successfully, you can continue with the frontend(s).

If you have installed xine-lib to a non-standard prefix, make sure that you have `$prefix/bin` in your PATH and that your linker finds libs in `$prefix/lib` – otherwise trying to build modules that rely on xine-lib will fail with configure complaining about not finding certain parts of libxine. Using bash you can do something like:

       export PATH="$prefix/bin:$PATH"
       export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$prefix/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

to make sure libxine can be found by the frontend(s).

Last but not least. Here the build instructions. As stated earlier, those are the same for every xine module.

       ./autogen.sh [→ only if you checked your sources out of CVS]
       ./configure
       make
       make install

### Making your own RPM packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)

Basically you will only have to issue one command, if you have just downloaded a source tarball from our web site:

       rpmbuild -ta <THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_SOURCE_TAR_BALL>

(Older versions of RPM use rpm instead of rpmbuild.)

This will start the binary and source RPM building. After compiling is finished, a binary rpm is placed in your rpm binary directory which is something like `/usr/src/RPM/RPMS/<YOUR_ARCHITECTURE>` and a source RPM is written to your rpm source dir (e.g. `/usr/src/RPM/SRPMS`).

In case that you have a fresh CVS checkout, you will need to do the following first in order to get a tarball release out of it which you can later use with the rpmbuild -ta command above:

       ./autogen.sh && make clean && make dist

In any case, please keep in mind that you have to build and install xine-lib first before you can proceed with xine-ui.

### Making your own .deb packages (xine-lib, xine-ui, gxine)

You'll need a CVS or HG snapshot tarball or source checked out from the repository.

First, make sure that the "devscripts" package is installed. You'll then need the following commands (the first one isn't needed unless you're using a snapshot tarball):

       tar xzf <PACKAGE-VER.tar.gz>
       cd <PACKAGE-VER>
       ./autogen.sh noconfig
       debuild binary

(If debuild complains about unmet dependencies, then install them using aptitude install <PACKAGES> (as root) then re-run debuild binary.

Once the build has been successfully completed, you'll have some new .debs.

       cd ..
       ls *.deb
       su - -c 'cd '"`pwd`"' && dpkg -i <DEB_PACKAGES>'

Ubuntu users will probably want to use this instead of that su:

       sudo dpkg -i <DEB_PACKAGES>

In any case, please keep in mind that you have to build and install xine-lib first before you can proceed with xine-ui or gxine.

### Can I provide additional CFLAGS for compilation?

Yes, you can do so by setting the CFLAGS variable and then running configure again. You can even pass them to configure directly. Example:

       ./configure CFLAGS="-march=i686"

Other user variables configure respects are:

- CC to specify the compiler executable

- CPP to specify the C preprocessor executable

- LD to specify the linker executable

- CPPFLAGS to pass additional include paths or other preprocessor options

- LDFLAGS to pass additional library paths or other linker options

An example combining some of these would look like:

       ./configure CC="/opt/intel/bin/icc" LD="/opt/intel/bin/xild" \
       CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/dvdnav" LDFLAGS="-L/home/guenter/xine_libs"

### Are there binaries for my AMD K7 (Athlon™) available? Can I build them?

If you have a recent gcc you can try to compile "more" k7 support in (esp. better instruction scheduling). If the configure script should fail to detect your processor/gcc correctly, try passing the canonical system name for your machine to configure with the --host option, e.g.

       ./configure --host=k7-pc-linux-gnu

### Build problems: xine engine (xine-lib)

#### The package doesn't compile at all!

In order to be able to compile xine-lib, you need (amongst other things) the zlib compression library plus the appropriate headers, which are often found in a package called zlib-devel or similar.

Read again carefully the output ./configure produced and/or compiler warnings and error reports, they often contain helpful information to find out what's going on. If you're stuck here and decide to post your problem on the xine-user mailing list, make sure you include these outputs.

#### The Xv video-out plugin fails to compile!

If you want to have Xv support compiled in, make sure you either have a shared Xv library on your system, e.g. ls /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv* should give you some .so libs, like this:

       /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.a
       /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.so
       /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.so.1

Alternatively you need to have libtool 1.4 or newer installed, then libXv.a is sufficient. Otherwise you can create the shared versions yourself:

       ld --whole-archive -shared -o libXv.so.1 libXv.a
       ln -s libXv.so.1 libXv.so
       ldconfig

Now you should be ready to build the Xv video-out plugin on your system.

### Build problems in frontends (gxine/xine-ui/…)

#### I have installed xine-lib but the frontend complains about not finding it!

First of all take a closer look at the compilation instructions above again. You will probably find your answer there right away.

As stated there (there again that hint *grin*), make sure that you have `$prefix/bin` in your path and that your linker is able to find libraries installed in `$prefix/lib` By the way, $prefix is where you installed your xine-lib to earlier (yes, installing xine-lib with make install or installing the corresponding distribution-provided -dev or -devel package would be a good idea before trying to compile the frontend ;) ).

### Can I install xine in my home directory (without being root)?

Sure. First set up a subdir where you install your private software, eg.

       mkdir ~/xine

Then you have to set a few environment variables – it's probably a good idea to add this to your `~/.bashrc` (or somewhere similar):

       export PATH="$HOME/xine/bin:$PATH"
       export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/xine/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

Now you can unpack tarballs e.g. in `~/xine/src` (mkdir ~/xine/src if necessary) and do a

       ./configure --prefix=$HOME/xine
       make install

You also need to tell frontends using xine-lib, where to find it:

       ./configure --prefix=$HOME/xine --with-xine-prefix=$HOME/xine

### How to compile xine for Windows?

For compiling xine under Windows with MinGW, CygWin or MS Visual C see `README.WIN32`.

For cross-compiling xine under comfortable unix-like environment with MinGW see `README.MINGWCROSS`.

## Playback of various stream types

### DVD Playback with xine

#### How do I play back DVDs with xine?

Newer xine (1.0.x) releases come with a full-featured DVD plugin that should be able to handle any unencrypted, non-locked DVD with full menu navigation support. No external plugins are required anymore here.

To get DVD playback working, first make sure you have a symlink `/dev/dvd` pointing to your DVD device on your system. For example, if your DVD drive is the master ide drive on the second IDE channel, `/dev/dvd` should point to `/dev/hdc`. Please note that if you are using the ide-scsi emulation on your system, it is likely that your DVD drive got mapped to a scsi device node even though it is an ide drive. In that case first check out you boot/kernel logs (or run cdrecord -scanbus) to find out which device it got mapped to and set the symlink accordingly (should be something like `/dev/scd0`, `/dev/scd1`, … in that case). Also make sure you (as a user) have sufficient (read and write) permissions on your DVD drive. This could mean you either have to change the device permissions or add your user to a special group (e.g. addgroup cdrom username), depending on your setup and/or distribution.

It is highly recommended to switch DMA mode on for your DVD drive (without it even very recent machines will have trouble producing smooth video output). Use a command like hdparm -d 1 <device> on your DVD device. Please note that even if you're using ide-scsi you will have to set the dma flag on the ide device node (e.g. `/dev/hdc`), not the mapped `/dev/scd` scsi device.

To be able to play back encrypted DVDs you need to have libdvdcss installed on your system (please check if this is legal where you live). If you do not understand what the term "encrypted DVD" means here: As a rule of thumb, every DVD you have to pay money for is most likely encrypted.

To make matters worse, apart from encryption, there is another obstacle to take: the region code. The DVD authorities decided to divide the world into eight geographical regions. Have a look at http://www.dvdforum.gr.jp/RegionMap.pdf if you want to know which number has been assigned to your country. It is now their idea, that you shall only play DVDs, which have been produced for your region. If you take a DVD off the shelf in your local store, you should find a little globe-like icon which shows the region code the disc is for.

Newer (post-2000) DVD drives (so-called RPC-2 drives) check the DVD region, which means they'll prevent you from playing back DVDs that have a different region code from what the drive is set up for. Some drives come with a factory setting of region 0 so they can play back any DVD until a region code is set. Others refuse to play any DVD at all until they are told a region. The easiest way to handle this is to use the regionset utility from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31346&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_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 Quicktime (.mov, .mp4) files using xine?

Quicktime is just a system layer (container format) which can contain various different audio and video formats. The system layer itself is fully supported in xine. However, some quicktime audio/video codecs are not natively supported yet. Luckily, if you are using a x86 compatible machine (any recent PC hardware should do) you can install and use the original Quicktime DLLs and watch most streams (trailers) that can be downloaded from the net.

Possibly the most convenient way to get the Quicktime DLLs is to download them from the MPlayer website http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . The package is called "essential". Unpack it and move everything you find inside to `/usr/lib/codecs` (actually you can place them anywhere you want, e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then you'll have to set `decoder.external.win32_codecs_path` in your xine config file accordingly). Restart xine then and you should be able to watch Quicktime trailers.

### Real Network files/streams

#### Can I watch Real (.rm, .ram) files using xine?

The situation with real files and streams is pretty similar to the situation with Quicktime Streams (see above). The newer real audio and video formats are only supported by using binary-only codecs which are not included in xine.

Possibly the most convenient way to get the Real codecs is to install RealPlayer 9 or RealPlayer 10 and set the `decoder.external.real_codecs_path` in your xine config file to the name of the directory which contains the codecs (look for drvc.so); it's probably something like `/opt/real/RealPlayer/codecs/`. Restart xine then and you should be able to watch Real files/streams.

Another way to get the Real codecs is to download them from the MPlayer website http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . The package is called "essential". Unpack it and move everything you find inside to `/usr/lib/codecs` and set the `decoder.external.real_codecs_path` in your xine config file to `/usr/lib/codecs` (actually you can place them anywhere you want, e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then you'll have to set `decoder.external.real_codecs_path` accordingly). Restart xine then and you should be able to watch Real files/streams.

#### What about (live) network streams (pnm://, rtsp:// style urls)?

xine supports both pnm and rtsp streaming. However, digging out the actual pnm/rtsp url can be tricky as they're often packed into heavy JavaScript and HTML code on most websites. You can either use a combination of your browser's "save source" function and wget or use a xine browser plugin (currently the gxine frontend comes with a simple mozilla plugin, for example). When you decided to dig out the url by hand don't get fooled by the many redirectors that are often placed around the actual url. Use wget to download any http://-style urls and use less to look inside the downloaded .ra/.ram files where you will find the actual pnm/rtsp url which can be opened using xine.

### Can I watch Windows Media (.asf/.wmv/.wma) files using xine?

While the container format (system layer) ASF (wmv is just an alias) is fully supported in xine, for newer windows media 9 based streams you'll need to install windows binary codecs (.DLLs).

Possibly the most convenient way to get the Windows DLLs is to download them from the MPlayer website http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . The package is called "essential". Unpack it and move everything you find inside to `/usr/lib/codecs` (actually you can place them anywhere you want, e.g. someplace in your home directory, but then you'll have to set `decoder.external.win32_codecs_path` in your xine config file accordingly). Restart xine then and you should be able to watch windows media streams.

### Can I watch Digital TV (Digital Video Broadcast) using xine?

At the time of this writing DVB support is a very new and experimental feature in xine. The number of supported cards is pretty limited at the moment. See `doc/README.dvb` (in the xine-lib tarball) for details.

### How do I play streams from STDIN?

Use something like:

       cat stream.mpg | gxine stdin:/

### How can I watch files with external AVI subtitles?

In xine 0.9.13 this used to be:

       xine foo.avi%bar.sub

Latest xine-lib modules (1-beta3 or newer) support external subtitles for any media file, not only AVI. In order to use it you can pass a special MRL construction like:

       xine file://path/to/test.mpg#subtitle:/path/to/file.sub

The external subtitles support can also be used by any xine frontend. Currently xine-ui and kaffeine implement this feature with a subtitle selection dialog.

## Running xine

### I have a lot of dropped frames – what can I do?

Your hardware might be too slow for xine. Make sure you turn on all speed optimizing options. A few things you should check (in order of importance):

- First of all, run the xine-check script included in xine package (probably already installed in your system). xine-check will report several of the most common problems listed here. Sample output from xine-check:

         xine-check
         Please be patient, this script may take a while to run...
         [ good ] you're using Linux, doing specific tests
         [ good ] looks like you have a /proc filesystem mounted.
         [ good ] You seem to have a reasonable kernel version (2.4.18)
         [ good ] intel compatible processor, checking MTRR support
         [ good ] you have MTRR support and there are some ranges set.
         [ good ] found the player at /usr/local/bin/xine
         [ good ] /usr/local/bin/xine is in your PATH
         [ good ] found /usr/local/bin/xine-config in your PATH
         [ good ] plugin directory /usr/local/lib/xine/plugins exists.
         [ good ] found input plugins
         [ good ] found demux plugins
         [ good ] found decoder plugins
         [ good ] found video_out plugins
         [ good ] found audio_out plugins
         [ good ] skin directory /usr/local/share/xine/skins exists.
         [ good ] found logo in /usr/local/share/xine/skins
         [ good ] I even found some skins.
         [ good ] /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdc
         [ good ] /dev/dvd points to /dev/hdc
         [ good ] DMA is enabled for your DVD drive
         [ good ] found xvinfo: X-Video Extension version 2.2
         [ good ] your Xv extension supports YUV overlays (improves MPEG 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 colourspace conversion. The video section contains important information about several Xv drivers.

  If Xv cannot be used for some reason, make sure your display is set up to 16bpp, not 24 or higher (reduces memory bandwith). Some Xv drivers may also have better performance with 16bpp.

- Make sure the hard drive (or cdrom/dvd drive) which supplies the video data is in DMA mode (if supported).

  On most linux-based systems, you can use hdparm to check this:

         hdparm /dev/hda
         [...]
         using_dma    =  1 (on)
         [...]

  You can enable DMA mode with the following command:

         hdparm -d1 device_of_your_drive_that_supplies_video_data

  In some cases where this fails it helps to specify the dma mode to use, for example:

         hdparm -d1 -X 66 device_of_your_drive_that_supplies_video_data

  In RedHat 8.0 an additional entry in /etc/modules.conf

         options ide-cd dma=1

  should help (reboot for this change to take effect).

  More information about this may be found here: http://oreilly.linux.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html .

- Use a recent kernel which is optimized for your hardware. Old kernels may lack support for accelerated instructions like SSE, for example.

- Close other applications (use a tool like "top" to find out what applications are using up CPU power). Programs that update the system clock like ntp should also be disabled.

- Enable MTRR support in your kernel. If you are still using XFree 3.x, you'll have to tell the kernel yourself where the graphics memory is. You'll find details about that in the linux dvd howto.

  If you're using X.org or XFree 4.x, enabling MTRR support in your kernel should be enough (use a recent kernel!).

  Try a cat /proc/mtrr – if the file exists and you find an entry corresponding to the amount of graphics memory you have, everything should be fine.

- Have your X-server (usually X.org or XFree86) running with higher priority. Most recent linux distributions (like RedHat 8.0 or Mandrake 9.0) should do that for you, improving not only xine but desktop responsiveness in general.

  Use the "top" utility and verify under the "NI" column if the X process has a negative value, this indicates a higher priority. See "The X Window User HOWTO – Performance considerations" for further instructions http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XWindow-User-HOWTO/performance.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 `engine.buffers.video_num_buffers:500` to a higher value (e.g. 1000 or 2500).

### Oki, xine doesn't drop frames now but video output still is not really smooth!

Video output can be further improved by tuning your linux kernel:

- Set HZ to 1000 in `/usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h`

- Try applying scheduler patches, especially the O(1) and the preemptive patches have proven useful at the time of this writing (spring 2003).

Linux 2.5/2.6 will probably have these improvements out of the box.

Miguel Freitas has written a nice article about his kernel multimedia experiments .

### I have problems when using xine on FreeBSD, Solaris, … !

Check out the the corresponding README files in the directory `xine-lib/doc`.

### What is aalib? How do I use it in xine?

aalib is an ascii art library. xine comes with an aalib video output plugin so you can watch movies in your xterm, on the console or on your old vt100 – very cool ;> … another nice option is to preview movies on a remote server in your shell over ssh.

To use it make sure you have aalib installed correctly before you configure/build xine-lib and xine-ui. In addition to the xine binary a binary named aaxine should get built and installed. You can then use something like:

       aaxine foo.mpg

to use aalib video output.

### Does xine support my dxr3 / hollywood+ card?

While xine's focus is clearly on software decoding, the dxr3 is supported.

You can find more information about using xine with the dxr3 here (also covers how to do tv output using the dxr3).

## Audio related questions

### What audio drivers does xine support? OSS? Alsa? Arts? Esd?

Currently xine support audio output via OSS (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 `audio.a52.dynamic_range:1` in your xine config file (or use some gui config dialog).

### When I play this stream, xine shows video but there's no audio!

If this happens with any video, first try a different audio driver (gxine -A oss, gxine -A arts, xine -A alsa …).

If this problem only occurs with one specific stream, maybe switching to a different audio channel (using the gui) helps. Some DVD streams have audio on strange channels.

If all this doesn't help, maybe you're missing an audio codec or you found a bug. If you decide to post your problem on the xine-user mailing list, make sure to include all console output xine produced and also clearly state what type of stream you tried to play back or, even better, make a test stream available somewhere for developers to download and try.

### Can xine produce 4-/5-channel surround audio output?

Yep, it can do that using OSS or ALSA drivers, provided that the driver supports it. However, since xine cannot detect if there are actually speakers connected to the additional channels, you'll have to activate that feature manually.

You can do this either in the config dialog while xine is running (press the config button on the xine panel and go to the AUDIO tab) or have it the complicated way by editing the config file yourself which is located in your home directory in `.gxine` or `.xine`:

       audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.0
       audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 4.1
       audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Surround 5.1

### What about ac3 output via spdif to an external ac3 decoder?

xine can do that too. Pretty much the same story as for 4-/5-channel surround (see above). You can either use the config dialog or edit the config file (`~/.xine/config` or `~/.gxine/config`) yourself:

       audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through

### Getting SPDIF output from a SBLive 5.1 using OSS drivers

The following explains how to get the above configuration going with xine. Some parts of it may applicable to other configurations (cards that use the EMU10k1 chip) as well.

#### Requirements

1. xine-lib >= 1.x.x

2. OSS driver

3. an external decoder

4. a cable to connect the SBLive to the external decoder

The configuration described was tested using a Soundblaster live 5.1 (rev 7) with a Yamaha DSP-AX620 external decoder.

#### Retrieving the driver

The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded at http://opensource.creative.com/. The driver package contains documentation on how to install it. Besides that I'd like to add the following notes.

In order to compile and install these drivers, you need a valid kernel configuration file. For RedHat Linux's pre-compiled kernels these configuration files can be found in `/usr/src/linux/configs`. After you've located the correct config file for your kernel, you need to copy it to `/usr/src/linux/.config` For example, when you run the 2.4.18-i686 kernel do :

       cp /usr/src/linux/configs/kernel-2.4.18-i686.config /usr/src/linux/.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.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through

In case the setting is not in the file you can add it.

#### The cable used for the SBLive can easily be self-made or buy a stereo 3.5mm jack to dual RCA cable.

What you need to make the cable yourself:

- stereo 3.5mm jack plug

- RCA plug

- shielded cable (video coax 75 Ohm will do)

Connect them as follows :

       center pin jackplug ------|----- center pin RCA plug
                       GND     __|__    GND

In order to test it use a DVD with AC3 or DTS track start xine and select the right audio track from user interface or start xine as:

       xine dvd:/1 -a 0

The external decoder should display something like "Dolby Digital" in case the selected audio track contains AC3 data or "DTS" in case the selected audio track contains DTS data. Of course stereo audio also goes through the SPDIF output, so the analog outputs of the SBLive 5.1 are not needed anymore.

### Changing the volume with the GUI control has no effect! What's up!?

Some xine drivers do not support volume changing although the GUI will show the volume bar. Usually this is not xine's fault: aRts C API, for example, doesn't offer any volume property to applications. Similarly, with ac3 pass through it is not possible to set the volume.

Note that recently we added support to "simulate" volume in aRts by changing sample values on-the-fly before delivering them to the driver. Not as good as having access to sound card's mixer but at least users will not complain about lacking of volume bar anymore! :)

### Audio is stuttering and i see a lot of "metronom: fixing sound card drift by -2115 pts" on the console output

Might be a soundcard problem, if it only comes in longer intervals. Your soundcard does not keep it's sampling frequency accurately enough, which results in audio and video getting out of sync and xine has to compensate. If you see the message only from time to time, you might remedy it by using the resampling sync method. You can do this by setting the configuration entry `audio.synchronization.av_sync_method` to `resample`.

If you receive the metronom message more often, maybe switching to different drivers (alsa to oss or vise-versa) can help here. It has also been reported that setting the configuration entry `audio.synchronization.force_rate` to the native sampling rate of your soundcard (try 44100 and 48000) helps sometimes.

Another, whole different possibility is that you have some background process running which is messing with the clock (like some ntp client – chrony, ntpd, …).

Occasional messages of "fixing sound card drift" may happen on start and when playing a long stream (like a movie). This is normal behaviour, nothing to worry about.

### xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback, especially with DVDs

You are using the OSS audio output plugin, right? In order to keep video and audio in sync, xine regularly queries the audio driver for the amount of delay induced by the current length of the driver's audio buffer. Unfortunately some OSS drivers seem to be broken because the can return strange values here. This confuses the xine audio subsystem and makes it drop audio.

You should try the various settings of the configuration entry `audio.oss_sync_method`. The options `getodelay` and `getoptr` ask the driver and might therefore show the problem. But chances are that only one is broken and the other works, so you should try them both first, since they are the most accurate. The option `probebuffer` does not ask the driver directly but tries to determine the buffer length from outside. This should work with any driver and is the way to go, of the driver dependent methods fail. `softsync` is the least accurate and should be used only in emergency situations.

## Video related questions

### I can hear the audio – but I don't see a picture!

Probably your hardware is simply too slow – see above for some hints on how to speed things up.

Another possibility is that you using a buggy Xv driver, see the next questions.

### I only see a blue (or green or black) video image most of the time.

You are either watching a very boring video (just kidding) or you are suffering from a bug in the Xorg 6.7 implementation of X11.

The workaround is to add the line

       Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"

in the `Device` section of your X server configuration (usually `/etc/X11/xorg.conf` or `/etc/X11/XF86Config`).

### The image looks strange, it is shifted, cropped or shows weird lines!

This points to a problem with the Xv extension, which is used by xine to display the video image. To verify this, try running xine with the XShm video output plugin:

       xine -V XShm

If that works fine, you just proved, that the Xv extension is buggy. xine will remember the last used video output plugin, so the setting will stay at XShm. You could simply continue using this, but XShm is a lot slower than Xv, so read on and see if you can get it working. Usually you should look for updated versions of the X driver module that belongs to your graphics card.

Other possibilites are limitations in either your X driver module or your graphics hardware. If your card could somehow be running out of ressources (graphics RAM perhaps) and displays an incorrect Xv overlay because of that, try reducing the display resolution and/or colour depth.

Consult the next question for more details on Xv.

### How can I make xine use the Xv extension and what drivers do I need?

xine will normally use Xv by default if it is available. In some cases you might need to choose Xv playback manually (when the `~/.xine/config` file for some reason says that you want to use XShm):

       xine -V Xv

If this doesn't work for you, it may be possible that Xv is not present on your system.

First you need to install/use X.org or XFree 4.x. Once you got that you have to make sure the X drivers you're using are supporting Xv on your hardware. Here are some hints for individual gfx chips:

- 3Dfx: if all you get is a solid black window, upgrade to X.org or XFree 4.1.0 or later.

- ATI: if you only get "half a picture", try lowering your resolution or bit depth, disable DRI (looks like you ran out of video RAM)

- Trident card: If you see vertical bands jumbled, upgrade to the latest xfree/experimental trident drivers (for the CyberBlade XP a driver exists here: http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/ )

- nVidia: With newer GeForce cards, Xv should work with XFree 4.2.0 or newer, for older RivaTNT cards use the binary drivers from nvidia (of course the binary drivers work as well for GeForce cards)

- Mach64/Rage3D (not Rage128/Radeon) cards/chips get no XVideo with standard drivers, try GATOS drivers instead

- intel: i815 has Xv support in XFree 4.x, others unknown

- Permedia 2/3 has Xv support in XFree 4.x

- Savage: at least some older drivers tend to lock up the whole machine, try the drivers available from http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html .

- SIS: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in XFree 4.x

- Chips and Tech 6555x, 68554, 69000, 69030 have Xv support in XFree 4.x

- NeoMagic: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in Xfree 4.x

- SiliconMotion: certain controllers (more info needed!) have Xv support in Xfree 4.x

- Matrox: G200 or newer (but not Parhelia) have Xv support in XFree 4.x. For Parhelia, use the binary only drivers available from matrox' website.

### Some parts of my X Desktop get transparent when xine plays the video!

Looks like some colours on your GUI match the colour key which Xv uses. You can change the colour key value to avoid this. There should be a line like:

       video.device.xv_colorkey:2110

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

### How do I get Xv working with compiz?

Tell xine to prefer textured video. There should be a line like:

       video.device.xv_preferred_method:Any

in your `~/.xine/config` file where you can change the preferred method used by xine for the video overlay.

It may be that your graphics card or driver doesn't have the necessary support for textured video, or the video is rendered too slowly.

- ATI: you are likely to need xf86-video-ati later than 6.8.0; 6.9.0.91 or newer is recommended for slower/older hardware (< X1300) because the rendering speed has been improved a lot.

- Intel: 945 and later, at least, should be fine with xf86-video-intel 2.0 or later. Certainly with 2.2 or later.

- nVidia: will probably be fine. (FIXME)

If you find that textured video is significantly slower or isn't supported, you should either not use compiz or tell xine to use the xshm video output driver.

### The aspect ratio of the video is wrong!

Usually xine discovers the screen aspect ratio by querying the X-server and then adjusts the video automatically to make it look right. However, if that doesn't work try pressing "a" to manually change the aspect ratio.

If you have a wide screen monitor, make sure the X-server is correctly configured. The X-server must know the physical size of the screen, which is independent of the resolution being used.

For X.org, the screen size should be set in the `"Monitor"` section in the file `/etc/X11/xorg.conf`, as in the example below:

       Section "Monitor"
          Identifier   "Monitor0"
          VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
          ModelName    "DDC Probed Monitor - ViewSonic G773-2"
          DisplaySize  320	240
          HorizSync    30.0 - 70.0
          VertRefresh  50.0 - 180.0
       EndSection

For XFree86, the filename is normally `/etc/X11/XF86Config`.

Where `DisplaySize` specifies, in millimeters, the physical size of the monitor's picture area.

### What is the difference between discarded and skipped frames?

Sometimes xine will output a message like that:

       200 frames delivered, XX frames skipped, YY frames discarded

The difference between these counters is a little subtle for the non developer. There are two threads running in order to display video: the decoder thread will deliver frames to the video output thread. The latter is responsible for scheduling the frames to be displayed at the right time.

If your system can't keep up with decoding requirements, decoder will deliver overdue frames. Imagine if it finished decoding the frame tagged for displaying at 11:30 but xine clock marks 11:31. When this situation is detected, xine will try to skip decoding a few frames to recover. Not every decoder may support this feature.

When the frame is decoded to be shown somewhere in future but the output thread doesn't get scheduled in time by the operating system to complete the operation, the frame is discarded. One cause might be the disk access operation, which may halt the system for a few miliseconds without DMA. See performance section tips above.

Note that if a decoder can't skip frames for some reason, you would never see frames skipped (they would be all discarded).

### My xine is runing in black and white! / I only get a grey video output!

This frequently happens with new Xv drivers or when switching to a different video card. Background is that different Xv drivers often use different ranges for the contrast/brightness/saturation settings.

To fix this, try opening the xine settings window and try adjusting the sliders for contrast, brightness and saturation.

Please note that some frontends save these settings in their config file so when you have found a working combination, make sure you exit xine cleanly so the values are saved.

### Which is the best video driver to use?

xine supports several video drivers for outputing the image. These will differ on how the frames are copied to the video card memory, whether colourspace conversion and scaling is done in software or hardware, among other things. They may also differ on ease of use and stability.

Most of the time, Xv should give the users a good trade-off between quality, compatibility and ease of use. This is why xine tries to use Xv by default.

However some users may want to explore better the available hardware capabilities (eg. syncing frame drawing with monitor refresh). Also some Xv drivers contain slow copies and accessing the video card directly may yield performance gains.

Drivers that access hardware directly includes VIDIX (warning: requires root priviledges or kernel helper) 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

       subtitles.separate.use_unscaled_osd:0

### I can't see the OSD or it leaves a black box over the image!

If you are using xine-lib version 1-rc3 or newer, this is probably due buggy XV drivers that do not support unscaled OSD (the XShape extension) properly.

There have being reports of some ATI drivers that don't allow displaying anything over the video. The VIA Epia binary drivers is reported to leave a black box where the OSD was displayed.

The problem may be fixed by either updating the video driver, or disabling xine unscaled OSD support.

### Why colours of overlays/subtitles seem to be "leaking"?

xine blends most overlays, specially the ones from DVD discs, directly over the image (scaled OSD). Unfortunately most codecs (like MPEG2) use a subsampled image format (YV12) that makes properly blending an interesting challenge.

In short, this is a known xine bug. There have being discussions on improving the blending quality but, so far, nobody implemented a better (scaled) overlay renderer. Contact developers if you want to try doing something about it.

### Why external subtitles look so ugly?

You are probably using a xine-lib version older than 1-rc3. Try upgrading your copy and read the section about unscaled osd.

### Why subtitles can't be displayed outside the video?

It is possible, but older xine versions may not support it. There are two alternatives for rendering the subtitles outside the video image:

- Use the "expand" post plugin to increase frame height adding black bars to it. This will allow blending the subtitles over the black bars, since they will be part of the video now.

- Use unscaled OSD, as it does not requires any video to render the subtitles on.

Also notice that DVD overlays (including subtitles) are meant to be displayed in a fixed position, this is how the DVD menu highlighting works. xine does not support moving them.

### What kinds of subtitle fonts does xine use?

xine can use two kinds of fonts:

- TTF fonts

  If xine is compiled with freetype library xine recognizes and uses TTF fonts directly.

- xine fonts

  This is xine's native format. It's better because the font generator utility implements more features than the "on the fly" TTF renderer.

The font for text subtitles is selected via config option `subtitles.separate.font`. You can specify xine font name (`sans`, `serif`, …) or file name of the TTF font. The directories `$prefix/share/xine/libxine1/fonts` and `~/.xine/fonts` are searched for the fonts, with `$prefix` being the place xine-lib was installed to. Usually this is `/usr/local` or `/usr`. TTF fonts are also searched for in the current directory.

### How to create own xine subtitle fonts?

xine's native subtitle fonts can be generated from TTF fonts with the utility xine-fontconv. It isn't compiled and installed by default but you can make it manually. You'll need freetype and zlib packages together with their versions for development plus a compiler, of course ;) Here's how you build xine-fontconv:

- Get the source of xine-fontconv utility from the `misc` directory within the xine-lib sources.

- Compile it:

         gcc xine-fontconv.c -o xine-fontconv `freetype-config --cflags --libs` -lz

You'll need some TTF font for generating. Characters in this font should cover all codepages you want supported, otherwise you'll have missing characters.

Syntax is:

       ./xine-fontconf font.ttf font_name [encoding1 [encoding2 […]]]

For example default font `sans` was generated with following command:

       ./xine-fontconv Aril_Bold.ttf sans iso-8859-1 iso-8859-2 iso-8859-5 \
                                          iso-8859-9 iso-8859-15 cp1250 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 `subtitles.separate.src_encoding`. Note that you also need a font which contains all characters from the given encoding.

The default font `sans` and fonts `serif` and `mono` cover these encodings:

- iso-8859-1

- iso-8859-2

- iso-8859-5

- iso-8859-9

- iso-8859-15

- windows-1250

- windows-1251

## Error Messages: What they mean and what you can do

### Starting xine crashes X, I am logged out of my desktop!

xine itself is unable to crash X, so when your X server just shuts down or restarts with the login screen, there is something wrong with your X setup. Most common are problems with the Xv extension. Try running xine with the XShm video output plugin:

       xine -V XShm

If that works fine, you just proved, that the Xv extension is buggy. xine will remember the last used video output plugin, so the setting will stay at XShm. You could simply continue using this, but XShm is a lot slower than Xv, so consult the section on Xv and see if you can get it working. Usually you should look for updated versions of the X driver module that belongs to your graphics card.

### Starting xine fails with complains about audio drivers/devices!

You can select the audio driver using the -A option. So try:

       xine -A null

If you have ALSA drivers installed, try:

       xine -A alsa

If you run ESD (not recommended), try:

       xine -A esd

If you run artsd, try:

       xine -A arts

### "no video port found"

You got the Xv extension, but your video card driver doesn't support it. First try to find a driver that does support Xv on your hardware (check your graphics card vendor). If your driver has Xv support but you can't get it working, try at a lower resolution (1024x768 is enough even for anamorphic DVDs).

If all that fails, you can still use plain X11/XShm:

       gxine -V XShm foo.vob

### "Unable to open dvd drive (/dev/dvd)"

You probably don't have /dev/dvd (check that). If so, simply create a link /dev/dvd that points to your DVD device. Something like…

       ln -s hdc /dev/dvd

… should do the job. Also make sure you have read and write access on the device the symlink points to. See the dvd playback section for more information.

### My drive doesn't work and the kernel says "status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }"

This error can be fixed by recompiling your kernel with the option "Use multi-mode by default" enabled in the IDE settings.

### "demux error! 00 00 00 (should be 0x000001)"

Probably xine can't access your input source. Most commonly this happens when you're trying to play locked/encrypted DVDs. Remember that xine can't play such DVDs out-of-the box for legal reasons (see above).

If it is legal where you live, you can try to install libdvdcss. Once you have done that and re-start xine, it should automatically detect and use it to play back encrypted DVDs.

Another reason could be that your (RPC-2) DVD drive isn't set up for the right region (see above).

### "audio driver 'oss' failed, using null driver instead"

First of all, make sure that your OSS Audio drivers are working (i.e. you can play music with other software). Maybe you're using alsa? If so, try gxine -A alsa to see if this helps.

The most common reason for oss not working is that some other program is accesing your audio device. If you're using linux, the command fuser /dev/dsp should give you the PID of the process.

If you are using GNOME, chances are that this is caused by ESD. Now you have two possibilities. Either deactivate ESD (temporarily) by right clicking on the sound monitor applet and selecting "Place Esound in standby" or just kill it. Then xine will use OSS audio output. The other method is to make xine use ESD for audio output with:

       gxine -A esd

This may result in worse playback – exact syncronization is not possible with esd, so using oss should be preferred.

If you are using KDE, there is the possibility that the aRts sound daemon is currently running and thus blocking your sound device. You can check that by starting the aRts control (in your KDE menu it should be under Multimedia). If it is running, you can either use the aRts audio output plugin:

       gxine -A arts

Or you suspend the aRts daemon by checking the appropriate option in your aRts control. (recommended)

Newer versions of arts have an auto-suspend mode – this can lead to some nondeterministic behaviour of xine if it is set up to use the audio device directly. Using arts is recommended in that case; however, you will lose the ability to do four/five channel audio output.

### "video_out: throwing away image with pts xxx because it's too old"

This is a performance related problem. If you have a fast computer and this message is shown from time to time when playing a DVD or CD, it's very likely that DMA is not enabled for your drive.

### "No video plugin available to decode 'xxxxxx'."

You have tried to play a stream using a unknown or unhandled codec. Possibly the file uses some obscure proprietary format and no information is available on how to decode it.

If you're on an x86 platform (e.g. PC hardware) you might want to try installing binary-only windows medial, real networks and quicktime codecs (see above).

### "w32codec: decoder failed to start. Is 'xxxxxx' installed?"

You probably don't have the win32 dll needed to decode this file.

### xine just crashed on me – i didn't get any error message

OK, yes, that shouldn't happen and you're upset. We can understand that. But, to help you and of course to fix this, we need some information. So, let's go through the checklist and maybe prepare a nice bug report for the xine bug tracker:

- Did xine really crash (segfault) or did it hang (deadlock)?

- Can you reproduce the bug? (e.g. do you remember what you did and when you do it again it crashes again?)

- Is that a specific media file or format which crashes xine? (Have you tried other files types?)

- Check the console output (and include it in a bug report), maybe earlier there is some output that points to the problem.

- Your X server just froze on you? unfortunately that's a known problem with some chipsets and drivers (most commonly Savage chipsets) when using Xv. You might want to try running gxine -V XShm to see if the problem is related to the Xv driver. This will unfortunately be much slower, as lots of things are now done in software instead of hardware scaling/colour space conversion.

  Maybe at the time you read this, there's an X upgrade which fixes this for the Savage driver. If that works for you, please notify the xine crew at `<xine-user@lists.sourceforge.net>`, so they can update this FAQ!

- Even though we try to make each release as bug free as possible, xine is still under heavy development (nice excuse, isn't it? *grin*).

  If you write to the xine bug tracker make sure you include a the above information (when applicable) and also some information about your machine (operating system, cpu type and speed, gfx card, sound card, …) and please use a meaningfull subject line ("xine bug" is bad, "xine fails to play this quicktime trailer in fullscreen mode" ist much better).

  Thanks for taking the time to help improve xine.