Question about Xine (Linux media player)

Factual Questions
1

Running “Lycoris” linux - When I try to open Xine it opens for about half a second, makes the “error” sound and then proceeds to close itself. Same thing happens if I try to click on a file associated with Xine. So basically I can’t watch any videos. This is such an obscure problem that I am absolutely stumped as to what the cause or solution might be and I don’t really expect and answer but I thought it would be worth a try. By the way, this crappy idiot linux distribution for jerks doesn’t come with a c compiler so I can’t install the new Xine (or much of anything else for that matter.)

2

Open up an xterm and run it from the command line – just type xine. It’ll tell you what’s going on. My guess is you’ll see this:


audio_oss_out: Opening audio device...
audio_oss_out: using device >/dev/dsp<
audio_oss_out: opening audio device /dev/dsp failed:
Device or resource busy

If so, the problem is that the older “OSS” sound drivers don’t support playback from multiple sources simultaneously, so you’ll have to stop your mp3 player or whatever before you run xine. Or get the ALSA drivers.

3

Ahhhh…this is what it says…

It seems to be telling me that my hardware can’t run it but my card isn’t that old and I’ve ran Xine on other distros in the past…

4

Huh. What kind of video card do you have? It’s possible that X is using the generic VGA video driver instead of the accelerated one for your card.

Have a look in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 under the heading ‘Section “Device”’. For example, I have a Matrox G450 and mine says


Section "Device"
        Identifier      "G450"
        Driver          "mga"
        Option "AGPMode" "4"
EndSection

What does yours look like? Also, does the file /usr/X11R6/lib/libXv.a exist? How about /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.a? Those are the Xvideo and OpenGL extensions, respectively.

If all of the above looks to be correct, try wading through /var/log/XFree86.0.log to see if it says anything about why it’s not loading Xvideo.

5

Mine says:

I emphasized where it says PCI because it seemed strange to since my card is AGP. Could this hold any significance?

I have libXv.so.1 and libGL.so.1 but no .a files.

6

Mine says:

I emphasized where it says PCI because it seemed strange to since my card is AGP. Could this hold any significance?

I have libXv.so.1 and libGL.so.1 but no .a files.

7

Your configuration is fine, it’s the lack of those files that’s the problem. The .so files are linked to by regular programs, whereas the .a files (in this case) are loaded by the X server. You need both.

I’m at a loss to explain why you don’t have them; they should have been installed as part of the X server. I’m unfamiliar with your distribution…maybe they split the X server into several packages, some of which aren’t installed?

One thing you could probably do is to install Nvidia’s proprietary (free beer) drivers. That won’t get Xvideo working, but it should get you OpenGL, which apparently suffices.