Change from VLC to XINE

I have an ongoing problem with VLC. Had this with Quirky April, again with Quirky Werewolf. In the former case, it is VLC compiled in T2, in latter case it is a precompiled DEB package.

I have a test suite of videos, and many of them do not play properly with VLC. Artifacts and faulty rendering.

On the otherhand, XINE plays all of my videos.

I installed the 'xine-lib' and 'xine-ui' DEB packages from the Ubuntu repository, and confirmed that it played all of my videos. However...

It would not play DVDs, gave an error message about missing symbols in libdvdcss. Which rang a bell in my head...

Yeah, this is an old bug. It appears that the Debian/Ubuntu 'xine-lib' DEB maintainer has not compiled with configure option "--with-external-dvdnav". This is essential, as the inbuilt dvdnav only works with libdvdcss version 1.2.x.

However, for a very long time now, just about everyone, including Ubuntu, are using libdvdcss 1.3.x.

Annoying, yes. Anyway, I compiled xine-lib in Quirky Werwolf64, and also specified the path to the mplayer codecs (as otherwise xine-lib can't find them -- the DEB again):

Here is my config:

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --disable-dxr3 --disable-gnomevfs --disable-samba --enable-antialiasing --without-sdl --without-imagemagick --with-freetype --with-fontconfig --without-esound --without-jack --with-libflac --enable-faad --with-real-codecs-path=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/codecs --with-w32-path=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/codecs --disable-fb --without-caca --without-pulseaudio --with-alsa --enable-mad --enable-faad --enable-a52dec --enable-bluray --disable-vcd --disable-vdpau --enable-dvb --enable-xvmc --disable-directfb --disable-aalib --enable-oss --disable-vaapi --with-xcb --enable-libv4l --enable-v4l2 --with-external-dvdnav

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...I probably should have enabled SDL, as do have it in the Werewolf build.

Plays DVDs nice now.

I notice that the xine-lib developers haven't updated their project since November 2014. That's a shame, if they are going to let it die. On the otherhand, as it is working well, perhaps they don't feel any pressing need to do anything.

Tags: linux