Baslinux mailing list

["Ron Clarke" <ariadne AT earthlink.com.au>]

Hi Folks,

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:22:20 -0800, David Moberg wrote:

> For comparitive purposes, I downloaded xine and xine-ui from
> SW10. It works after you upgrade and install a few libraries.
> xine, when asked to play an AAC file, happily does so. If you are
> using the GUI, it even displays a visualization in the video
> window. I haven't tried any interface other than xine-ui, so I am
> not sure how well the other interfaces work.

  I also have xine running in BL21, with the extra library or two. And I
have stuck with the basic default gui.  It works pretty well. And it
seems to handle badly put-together avi files better than mplayer.

> Xine has other advantages over mplayer. For example,
> mplayer does not handle DVD menus correctly. Xine does.
> Mplayer has many codecs built in, so you cannot remove them
> to save space (without a recompile, at least). With xine, all of
> the codecs are in separate library files and you can remove
> some of them without preventing xine from playing files with
> other codecs. There are probably some other advantages
> that I did not find.

> It seems that if you want to view AAC files and DVD menus,
> and you have mplayer installed as well, it would be sensible to
> install xine and remove all of the codecs except the ones that
> mplayer cannot handle. Such a setup would be barely larger
> than mplayer alone, and would work with most a/v file formats,
> both common and unusual.

  I have the full (I think) set of codecs for xine in
/usr/local/lib/codecs and mplayer can pick anything it doesn't have
built-in.  But the RealPlayer has it's codecs somewhere else, and I
don't think mplayer can find those.  In any case, I haven't been able to
get mplayer to play and .rm files from the hard drive.

> Mplayer seems to handle most multimedia files better than
> xine does. It also has more video output drivers than xine
> and more user interface frontends. xine is nowhere near
> as versatile as mplayer is, but it does have a more modular
> design.

   Does your mplayer have any easy-to-install front ends ?  i.e.
something that would act as a file-finder ?   At the moment I am using
mplayer (and xine, mtvp, QV, and several others) as "helpers" to mc (console 
and X),
 emelfm (X), Links (console and X), etc., but on low resource systems
that may be too much overhead.

Regards,
         Ron


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