The xine hacker's guide (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The xine hacker's guide (2003)

web.mit.edu

50 pointsLammy24 comments

Man. "xine" is a name I haven't heard for many years. Wonder how many people are still using it.

As as university student in 2006, fast internet access was a still relatively pricey thing. I already knew how to do basic things in Debian, and would have similar Linux experience at home. Surpsingly, Slackware (3 CDs at that time) provided all the apps (C compiler, LaTeX etc) needed for doing homework. And of course, a multimedia player called "xine" was bundled. Playing all the ripped videos wasn't problem at all.

I assume the development was practically halted years ago and no fork?

Update: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xine/files/

Oh it's still alive :)

Xine, mplayer, divx, xvid, etc these things were a lot more temporary than I anticipated, but it does make sense when you take into account the competitive advantage of newer codecs, hardware acceleration, etc. And of course the death of the CD-R and the DVD in the mainstream.

Brings back memories… along with skinning XMMS. Good times

I still use MPlayer every day. I thought it had similar traction with Linux users as vlc.

It's been superseded by mpv.

You can have both. Mplayer2 it's lighter on older devices.

mplayer user here as well. Every time I start a video from the commandline I use mplayer.

As far as I know mpv is descended from mplayer and still plays a pretty big part in the media player landscape these days.

And Celluloid (ex GNOME MPV) is a pretty snazzy GNOME wrapper for it.

Did any of you guys use Totem, Kaffeine? Man I just looked this up, XINE was integrated into these media players. Man i used those two alot back in the day. I was in college, so that means must of been like in 2001 or something...

Kaffeine for easy TV channel seeking.

What a flashback!

I don't miss the days of bouncing between media backends hoping one would play a media file better than another.

I use mplayer almost every day, still. One of the constants in my life. :)

Memories:) I remember Xine having a plug-in architecture, which would of allowed developers to add new features and functionality to the software and create "forks". Think its safe to assume it did many times since xine was open-source, under GNU General Public License.

That brings back memories! I used to have commit privileges for xine and worked mainly on hardware acceleration for Solaris/SPARC.

When I started university the internet access in the student accommodation was only via HTTP proxy, and I couldn't access Sourceforge or Blastwave properly any more. So, perversely, my Computer Science degree forced me out of open-source for a while :-P.

Genuine question: how do you regard getting a degree in CS at that time [given the unbelievable changes in tech since then]?

I guess that I’m around the same age to the author you’re replying to, and if you accept my answer, it’s pretty simple “I’m glad I got it, and would do it again if I had the choice”.

Because while people have access to what we have learnt and beyond for free, going through a proper academic curriculum with the interactions the environment brings makes you a different person, and allows you to tackle depths of any issue without fear and uncertainty.

Being self taught or having a greater breadth with less depth brings you flexibility, but being “T” or “I” shaped brings much more than that.

Lastly, having that power is fun to begin with. Makes life enjoyable.

I think the experience was and remains valuable to me. I don't think that the changes in technology that I've seen in my career thus far have been so profound as to invalidate the value of that eduction.

I often hear the sentiment that technology moves so fast and everything you knew yesterday is obsolete, but it doesn't really resonate with me. Languages, libraries, protocols, and practices come and go, but they're all linked together in one long chain of incremental change. Maybe large-language models will sweep everything away one day, but we had to start somewhere.

I'm curious as to what unbelievable changes in tech you think would impact getting a degree?

I'm feeling old right now, this and also XMMS. Good old days, so much memories...

Xine, w32codecs, XawTV, AleVT, TVTime, NXTvEPG.. good times. Now allmost all of these are dead.

I think no one updated TVTime for DVB. It was a supreme TV tuner and viewer.

Tvheadend is alive: https://tvheadend.org

It's like VDR?

As a young newb, I couldn't figure out how to make DVDs play on Linux, even with the DeCSS code. Xine played them just fine though, with a great UI. <3 to those wonderful developers.

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