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Install Xine Mediaplayer in Ubuntu

Xine was the first ever multimedia player I installed in GNU Linux around 2002-2003 I think. When I used Linux for the first time and even the Totem wasn't around that time... and for sometime I used to wonder, why the heck Linux does not give a media player?. It didn't make any sense to me.

But later I realized the issue.. of being "free" and all that, to which still to this day.. I'm not quite sure if we're really free just because we use "GNU" powered software. Anyhow, enough of that bullshi*. Let me tell you few things about Xine. Xine is actually not a player, it is a multimedia engine.

Meaning that, if you just install Xine only in Linux, you can't do anything with it. It's like trying to drive a car without a driver. So, unless you install a GUI front-end such as Totem-xine or the official Gxine (GTK based GUI) or xine-ui (which is very popular) you won't be able to play anything whatsoever. So when installing Xine you have to install one of their officially supported GUI front-ends as well.

And for sometime I haven't been heavily dependent on Xine (been using MPlayer) so, not quite sure... its drawbacks, etc these days. But few years ago when VCD was still popular, you couldn't play a .dat extension which was copied to the HDD via Xine (plays VCD from the disk... Linux had a mounting issues with VCD disks). But for a multimedia player it is highly customizable and plays almost all the multimedia codecs out of the box nonetheless.

Main features...

*. Plays almost all the files.

*. Equalizer support.

*. Skin-able interface.

*. Advanced video and audio features (various enhancing effects, etc).

*. Playing Web channels.

So, if you use Ubuntu and need to know how to install Xine, then open your Terminal and issue the below command.

sudo apt-get install xine-ui libxine-extracodecs

Xine-ui front-end




But if you want the GTK+ based front-end then replace the above command with the below one


sudo apt-get install libxine-extracodecs
sudo apt-get install gxine

The Xine front-end for Gnome

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