xine sound crippled

[Andrej Marjan]

On February 21, 2009 12:32:46 am Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> Some here are good in these multimedia things. I am not.
>
> I like watching movies from Google Movies. I intercept them and save
> from web browser cache and then try to use xine to play.
>
> Movies are displayed properly when viewed in web browser window (flash),
> with sound played properly also.
>
> However, some movies, while video plays properly, have problem with
> sound, when I try to play later a copy from a stored file.
>
> This is definitely a problem of xine and/or audio codecs.
>
> Why I know this? Because I installed a newest version of xine  and after
> that  some movies  that played sound properly with older version had
> problem to play properly sound with newer version. While some movies
> that could not play the sound properly with older version, now do not
> play well with newer version.
>
> The sound does exist but it is so crippled that it is very hard to
> understand it.
>
> All this is very frustrating. How to approach the problem?
>
> zb.
>

I've had problems lately with libxine and sound synchronization on all sorts 
of video files. The longer the video, the more likely it is to go out of sync, 
though it's more related to time spent in playback than to file length. I 
haven't bothered to debug it because mplayer works.

Over the years I've found the mplayer engine to be more robust on the whole 
than xine, even though libxine-based media players tend to be much nicer than 
mplayer. Also mplayer will occasionally screw up the aspect ratio (IIRC 
fixable through commandline options), but I've almost never had it fail to 
play a file. Even the really nasty ones that have been transcoded umpteen 
times and only barely work on Windows Media Player with an unholy amount of 
CPU.
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