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: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: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: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.