[Live-devel] xine interface

[Ross Finlayson]

At 02:05 PM 1/23/04, you wrote:
>Ross, I saw some of your discussion with xine earlier about combining 
>live.com rtsp and xine.  I was just wondering what came of this?  I also 
>needed to combine the two, but am finding it a bit harder than I had hoped.

I've pretty much given up on Xine.  First, it has a basic architectural 
flaw that would make receiving RTSP/RTP streams difficult: It assumes that 
all audio+video data comes in on a single input channel, and is 
demultiplexed from there.  This is fine for playing things like MPEG 
files.  However. most RTSP/RTP audio-video streams, however, use two 
separate RTP streams: one for audio; the other for video.  To handle these 
streams in Xine, one would need to first multiplex the data from the 
separate RTP streams together into a single audio+video stream, and then 
pass this to the rest of Xine for demultiplexing.  Ugh!

But more importantly, many of the Xine developers seem lacking in 
professionalism.  They have an irrational aversion to C++, and have 
rejected using the "LIVE.COM Streaming Media" code on that basis.  (In the 
1980s it might have made sense to avoid C++, but not nowadays, especially 
since the LIVE.COM code avoids using most of the newer, less implemented 
features of C++.)  Rather than using the LIVE.COM code, some of the Xine 
folks were even talking about trying to reimplement the RTSP/RTP client 
code from scratch in C!  They had no idea what would be involved were they 
to attempt this.  For laughs, you can read my response to them at 
<http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=6227708>

Instead, I recommend using the "VLC" media player 
<http://www.videolan.org/vlc/>, which now supports playing RTSP/RTP streams 
(using the LIVE.COM code).  VLC runs on Windows as well as Unix, and they 
even have pre-built binaries available.  (Note, though, that the pre-built 
binaries use a slightly outdated version of the LIVE.COM libraries.)  The 
VLC developers seem to be clueful.

Another possibility, of course, is "MPlayer" (which also uses the LIVE.COM 
code), but I've found this to be less reliable than VLC.  In fact, I now 
recommend VLC over even QuickTime Player.  (QuickTime Player has had 
several RTP-related bugs for many years now, and (in spite of my frequent 
requests) Apple shows no sign of ever fixing them.)



	Ross Finlayson
	LIVE.COM
	<http://www.live.com/>