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."

Comments

Applaude for 2 reasons

[AlabamaMike]

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.

Re:Applaude for 2 reasons

[LittleBigLui]

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.

Re:xine

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:not on x86

[fwankypoo]

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.

Re:xine

[Newtonian_p]

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.

Re:yeah but does it embed in a browser?

[bogie]

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.

Re:yeah but does it embed in a browser?

[Darf Bobo]

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.

Re:Mplayer uses ffmpeg

[glitch!]

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...

Re:More important

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:x86

[beerits]

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

Re:Illegal?

[greenrd]

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.)

Re:xine

[Compenguin]

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

Re:What has xine done

[vlad_petric]

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.

Re:Mozilla Plugin?

[canwaf]

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.

Re:But the important question...

[vivek7006]

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

open?

[DreadSpoon]

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...)

Re:whining about no official linux quicktime playe

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Mplayer also plays SVQ3 natively

[Replicant7]

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.