Xtheater For Linux

Xtheater is a MPEG-1 player in GTK+ capable of playing MPEG-1 format streams from file, http, and VCD with seek capability.

Xtheater is a Media Player for linux capable of playing MPEG video and audio files, network streams, and VCDs, as well as AVI and ASF files. It accompishes this through the use of libaviplay and smpeg.

It tries to keep things simple and straightforward to provide the simplest, most stable behavior as possilbe, while at the same time offering a nice featureset.

Installation of Xtheater is not the easiest install in the world. But it is also far from the hardest install. First you must install the following packages:

X11 - Required for everything. All modern *nix include this Glib/GTK - Required for everything, 1.2.x SDL - Required for everything, 1.2.x SMPEG - Required for MP3/MPG/VCD playback, 0.4.3 or higher. avifile - Required for AVI/ASF playback, from CVS repository

Avifile can be compiled without qt, so don't worry if you do not have qt, it will just not build some of the sample applications, sych as aviplay.

If you wish to install as much from binary packages, in general, the following package names will indicate binary packages of requirements listed above:

glib glib-devel gtk+ gtk+-devel SDL SDL-devel smpeg smpeg-devel

For AVI/ASF playback, you will have to get it from CVS, no binary packages are available. Note also that to get libaviplay to work properly it needs to be linked with libXxf86vm on some systems. do this by adding -lXxf86vm to the LIBS line of the lib/Makefile from the avifile tree.

After you have installed all prerequisite pacakges, you run ./configure. Before running configure, you may wish to read up on GL support. It can be enabled at this stage, but is not configured by default, for reasons explained in the GL section linked to previously.

After you have ran ./configure in the Xtheater directory to your liking, make install will put all the files in the right place. By default, the configuration is stored at /usr/local/Xtheater/config. the binary is placed at /usr/local/bin/xtheater, player plugins are in /usr/local/Xtheater/player/, and ui plugins are in /usr/local/Xtheater/ui/. None of this needs to be known for install, but is provided for reference here.

You should now be ready to run xtheater and have fun. Basic operation will be described in the next section, but this is very straightforward, so no instruction is needed, just provided for completeness.

What's New in 1.0.0 pre1 Release:

· Fix check for smpeg, SDL, and avifile to check for a more current version. · Enhanced flexibility of MPG/VCD fullscreen, allowing to choose scaling rather than a vidmode change. · Fixed bug with smpeg plugin being run on X drivers with XVideo extension. · Added support for XVideo extension for all player plugins, will automatically take advantage of XVideo overlays when available for scaling, revert to software scaler if unavailable · made GL support with Mpeg compile if available, it is not recommended unless you have no other choice, however. · Updated AVI/ASF plugin to use avifile-0.6 CVS rather than stable version. · Enhanced plugin framework somewhat. · Made it so that MPEG media could be closed by closing the playback window. · Fixed bug where openeing too many files sequentially would cause player to crash (contributed by John Thacker)

What's New in 0.9.2 Release:

· Fixed Seekbar to not update while being dragged. · Designed for latest official stable avifile release (0.53.x) · DPMS disabled for older XFree versions. · Fixed drag and drop with nautilus file manager. · Memory leak fixes by John Thacker