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Xine Gets Native Sorenson3 Decoding

gooofy writes "Freshly (im)ported from ffmpeg, xine 1-beta12 finally has native support for Sorenson SVQ3 video. This means that you're finally able to watch the latest quicktime trailers on any xine supported hardware platform, not just on x86. Other goodies in this release include support for ogg/theora, playback of cd/dvd over the network, improved handling of mpeg-2 files (resyncing) and many detail improvements."

30 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Applaude for 2 reasons by AlabamaMike · · Score: 4, Informative

    1: One less reason to run a Windows platform. 2: No more annoying "don't you want to buy this" ad when you're trying to watch a new trailer.
    -A.M.

    --
    Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
    1. Re:Applaude for 2 reasons by LittleBigLui · · Score: 3, Informative

      but the default decryption mode of libdvdcss uses the legit player keys (which can be reverse-engineered from any encrypted dvd), which is perfectly legal (no encryption broken), since the player keys aren't protected by copyright but are simply trade secrets and can be reverse engineered legally.

      on the other hand, libdvdcss provides two fallback methods which actually break the encryption of the dvd. by the use of those you agree to some serious butt-rape in a DMCA-gulag of the plaintiffs' choice.

      --
      Free as in mason.
  2. Re:xine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Give Totem a try if you're looking for a GTK+ (2.x) interface. Much nicer than the normal XINE interface :).

  3. Re:not on x86 by fwankypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think you read the article wrong... Whis is a native implementation of Sorensen 3 that can run on all supported platforms (including x86). It used to be that watching a Sorensen 3 encoded video involved the use of Win32 DLLs (either through WINE, or later by directly accessing the DLL). Now it isn't needed. So indeed one _can_ watch a Sorensen 3 video on x86 using the lates version of xine without any nutty DLL hacks.

    --
    The time of day is 29:33.
  4. Re:xine by Newtonian_p · · Score: 5, Informative
    Actually, xine is split into 2 components: xine-gui and xine-lib. If you do not like the xine-gui, you could look for alternate guis but keep the xine-lib part (and therefore the native Sorenson 3 support).

    One alternate gui I know is Kxine, a kde/qt based gui for xine. I think it looks nice.

    --

    There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't

  5. Re:yeah but does it embed in a browser? by bogie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mplayer with the Mplayer plugin usually does a pretty decent job with that. Maybe its not 100%, but when the big two web media companies(Microsoft, Apple) are trying to block you from entering their markets its not always a trival task.

    http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/

    btw screw you apple and microsoft for not providing media players for linux.

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
  6. Re:yeah but does it embed in a browser? by Darf+Bobo · · Score: 5, Informative

    In mozilla you can use 'View Page Info' and choose the 'Media' tab. URLs for video, etc have the 'Embed' type. Just pass the URL to mplayer if you have the bandwidth.

  7. Re:yeah but does it embed in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    or try the gxine mozilla plugins: http://xinehq.de/index.php/releases

    yeah, sometimes it just dont work right, but they put a little 'url' button there too so you can wget the thing..

  8. Re:Mplayer uses ffmpeg by glitch! · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could droping in its source tree the new version ffmpeg in lieu of the one that comes with it make Mplayer support native Sorenson 3 too?

    Yep, if your code uses the libavcodec call av_register_all(), then when you use av_find_stream_info(), it will "just work". I tried yesterday's libavcodec out of CVS on the Quicktime Animatrix movie, and the video quality was pretty good. Pity about not having the QDesign audio codec, though...

    --
    A dingo ate my sig...
  9. Re:Compress in Soreson by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you want to encode with free tools so that anyone can watch it, why not use MPEG-4? Or VP3, since anyone who has Sorenson has VP3.

  10. Re:More important by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Install apt-get for rpm, or configure urpmi, or just get debian, or emerge. Then do one of the following: apt-get install xine urpmi.install xine emerge xine Wait, you now have xine. Xine has long since been packaged well enough by third parties to make install a snap.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  11. Re:x86 by beerits · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you don't like the Apple supplied QuickTime Player why don't you try one of the many replacement players.

  12. Re:Illegal? by greenrd · · Score: 4, Informative
    In some countries, no reverse engineering is legal. Even in the United States, reverse engineering for "interoperability purposes" is legal. So yes, this is legal. (Assuming that they haven't stolen any code.)

  13. Re:xine by Compenguin · · Score: 3, Informative

    I tried totem but i had issues with some file formats that regular xine handeled fine and the only soultion i got was run gnome-mime-data from cvs

  14. Re:What has xine done by vlad_petric · · Score: 3, Informative
    For one, they have an audio/video sync code that works fine with the crappy soundcard drivers that linux has (see mplayer article on freshmeat).

    Trust me, once you watch starwars 2 on mplayer and the flying cars (Jedi council window) are like Queen Elizabeth's guards (i.e. they don't go smoothly at all) you switch to xine immediately. (yeah, I know -autosync. Hasn't improved much on my system). Don't get me wrong, mplayer is great - just not on my system. And I'm not going to pay 34$ to get commercial oss drivers.

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    The Raven

  15. Re:Mozilla Plugin? by canwaf · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to Xine's website there is a Mozilla plugin in the works that provides embedded stream playback. Until then, if you install gxine it comes with a Mozilla plugin that all you need to do 'ln -s' it into your ~/.mozilla/plugins... this will launch gxine and start playing with a nicer interface.

  16. Re:But the important question... by vivek7006 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes it will ....

    I had downloaded the matrix reloaded trailer but could not get the adio working for mplayer. Someone on slashdot suggested to download and install faad2 libraries, but I could never get mplayer to play the audio in the matrix reloaded trailer.

    But the good news is that with this new version of xine, you can play the matrix reloaded trailer with full audio support. Its cool!! especially because you cannot play it in fullscreen mode in win2k using quicktime (It only allows to double the image size, but no full sceen mode).

    BTW installation was a breeze. Just downlaod the lib and ui source and do the following for both of them. ./confure
    make
    make install

  17. Re:What has xine done by BJH · · Score: 2, Informative

    You don't have to pay $34 for anything. Get ALSA and be happy.

  18. open? by DreadSpoon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think Sorenson has ever been an open standard. QuickTime is, I believe; but then, it's quite possible to encode a movie in QuickTime _without_ using Sorenson. Sorenson is just one of the many possible codecs usable in the QuickTime "wrapper" format. Same goes for AVI and several other formats; they just wrap the several sub-encodings together. So you can encode both audio and video using two wholly unrelated formats, or whatever. (not a multimedia format expert...)

    1. Re:open? by shadowjk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Oh yes, many ways. DGA1, DGA2, Linux Framebuffer, plain X, X11Shm (Shared memory extensions), then we of course have DirectFB and lesser known KGI/GGI...

      However, that's all a bit moot, since you probably DON'T want to send the images to a framebuffer anyway. You'd want them to end up to the overlay surface, to take advantage of hardware colorspace transform and scaling. With mplayer there are even several routes to take:

      Vidix, mplayer's own kernel drivers for certain graphics card.
      mga_vid, mplayer's own kernel drivers for matrox cards, provides hardware acceleration in both X and in console mode
      And finally, Xvideo, which is part of X. The first two mentioned are a bit faster than Xvideo, and atleast mga_vid gives you tripple buffering as well.

      Of course this is only AFTER you've decoded the image, the number of ways an .avi or quictime .mov could be encoded, the multitudes of audio and video codecs that could be used is only limited by the fourcc, which would allow for, what, 2^32 different video codecs atleast? :-)

  19. Theora by yerricde · · Score: 2, Informative

    Or VP3, since anyone who has Sorenson has VP3.

    Especially because VP3 is free software now.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  20. No. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, no, no! That's COPYRIGHT LAW. Nothing like fair use exists for PATENT LAW.

    Please see http://www.mec.ac.in/events/rms/trans_2.html for an excellent speech by Richard Stallman on Software Patents. "So the most important thing for you to start with is never mix copyrights and patents as topics. They have nothing to do for each other." (There's also an audio recording of the speech on gnu.org, but I'm unable to locate it at this moment.)

  21. Re:whining about no official linux quicktime playe by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    Says the PFY as he fires up MPlayer(having downloaded the illegally-distributed Windows DLLs from the mplayer authors)

    Um, they aren't illegally distributed. Apple themselves distribute them for free - they'd be hard pressed to argue in court that while it's OK for random multimedia CDs and websites to redistribute QuickTime, it's not ok for the MPlayer guys to do it.

    Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think?

    Er, what? You need to get a handle on statistics dude! Nobody knows how big the market share of Linux is, but it's easily 2-3% - companies like IDC say this, not some random joe off the net. Apples market share has been declining steadily for some time now, go read OSNews, they have reported on it several times, and it's now hovering slightly above 2%. So you're smoking some serious stuff if you think MacOS is a long way in front of Linux in terms of market share - it may even be the other way around .

    They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"

    Apples biggest competitor is Linux by a long, long way. It's the only OS that also appeals to the UNIX-minded user base and can be installed on Apple hardware. No, Windows basically targets a different market at this level. I suspect this is the biggest reason they aren't doing anything - if you look at their contributions to free software, they've done basically what the licenses forced them to do and no more. They're happy to use free software to further their own ends, but aren't really happy to actually take part in the community.

    their legal department head is a total psycho-policy-bitch, completely the wrong thing for a cute-and-cuddly computer company

    Apple aren't cute and cuddly, not even close. You might like to think they are, but go through and learn about their history, Jobs' working style, you clearly already know about their legal tendancies. They're a company out to make the biggest buck they can, and the "cute and cuddly" feeling is a glow projected by their fearsome marketing department, not by their actions.

  22. Re:xine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The multimedia framework in KDE 3.1 uses libxine. I always use the KDE mediaplayers, for example Kaboodle, and it works very nice.

  23. Re:Apple is pushing QuickTime publishers to MPEG-4 by Alan+Partridge · · Score: 2, Informative

    "in relation to the codec used in Sorenson Squeeze"

    Not true. The legal action is over the CODEC used in Flash MX (Sorenson Spark), as Squeeze can use either SV 3.1 or Spark - Apple maintain that their agreement with Sorenson Media gives them exclusive rights to use A Sorenson CODEC, Sorenson says not ANY Sorenson CODEC.

    Incidentally, Sorenson's MPEG4 CODEC is a beaut, and gives MUCH better encodes than Apple's.

    --
    That was classic intercourse!
  24. Re:What has xine done by foolip · · Score: 2, Informative

    Was this supposed to be a funny troll?

    Granted, for a while MPlayer was better than Xine in terms of performance, support for different codecs etc. Performance is still better I should guess, but I haven't really tried. And yes, MPlayer can play that severely broken fsfawards2001.vob.

    However, look inside of MPlayer and you'll see that everything isn't as perfect. Everything is joined as one package -- gui built together with the rest of the code. No possibility of turning deinterlacing on and off during playback, or even toggling it with a gui.

    Enter Xine: libxine takes care of decoding buisness and talks to the output mechanisms (oss+xv in my case). It doesn't provide even a text-interface. All interface is done by xine-ui, gxine, kxine and some other alternatives. Take a pick.

    You may say that how it works inside is irrelevant, but I (being half-and-half a programmer) sure don't agree. As things grow, having clearly definied roles for each component will help avoid the tangled up state MPlayer is in. This is why the original developer of MPlayer left the project a while back ago, and then a little later said he was going to start libmplayer, which doesn't provide any gui or anything. Sound familiar?

    Oh, and in case it was a long time since you tried Xine, try again -- it's improved quite alot.

  25. Re:xine by David+McBride · · Score: 2, Informative

    The author of KXine, a friend of mine, is currently busy doing his finals and individual project for his Masters degree. Updates are likely to be slow-coming for the next few months or so. :-)

  26. Mplayer also plays SVQ3 natively by Replicant7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Both of xine and MPlayer use FFmpeg, which now supports native SVQ3 decoding. Ever since this weekend my CVS version of MPlayer has been able to play SVQ3 natively.

  27. Re:whining about no official linux quicktime playe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    > Um, they aren't illegally distributed.

    Wrong. The mplayer project does not have explicit permission from Apple to distribute them. You have read the QuickTime license agreement, haven't you?

    > Apple themselves distribute them for free

    Yes, you see, they're the COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

    > they'd be hard pressed to argue in court that while it's OK for random multimedia CDs and websites to redistribute QuickTime, it's not ok for the MPlayer guys to do it

    You don't know much about copyright, do you?

    One needs EXPLICIT PERMISSION to distribute.

  28. Re:xine by mr3038 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Most have seek bars that move smoothly under the mouse but aren't connected to the video while moving, or only seek to discrete points that are quite far apart. [...] VCRs have an excuse for being unresponsive, they are based on physical tape that must move.

    You know, most video formats have so called key frames and it's only those key frames from which the player can really start the playing. If you select a position between keyframes the decoder must compute all frames from previous keyframe to the point you selected. And some formats require the decoder to compute all frames after the selected frame and next keyframe, too! When some people encode movies with 10 minute keyframe interval [1] you can be sure that no player can quickly skip to any given location.

    There's your physical excuse for the lack of displaying video live while you move that track bar -- there's no way to compute the results fast enough. Yep, most players could do better than they do but if the underlaying decoder engine is designed with the playback in mind, it might be that it doesn't do backwards seek that fast. Once you have backend engine that can do smooth seeking , coming up with a nice frontend is a non-issue. Or, it might be hard to decide if those buttons should have "silver" or "grey" finish...

    [1] Say you have 24fps movie with the resolution of 720x360 pixels. With 10 minute keyframe interval the decoding engine needs to compute 10*60*24/2 = 7200 frames per seek on average. Considering that uncompressed frame takes about 0.5 MB, the player needs to handle about 7200 * 0.5 MB = 3600MB of data per seek... Of course, the situation isn't that bad usually but there're still lots of little bits to compute.

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