Xine supports digital audio extraction

[Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D.]

Xine supports digital audio extraction, so it is a consideration for
modern Macs. 

Xine is the "all singing, all dancing" free multimedia player.  
>From its own web page:

        What is xine?
        xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and
        VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and
        MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed
        over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common
        multimedia formats available - and some of the most uncommon
        formats, too.


How to make it work
--------------------
For the pure at heart, there is the source code tarballs from the Xine
website. For the adventurous, there are YDL-4 specific RPM's and SRPM's
available from:

	http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/yellowdog/

Using these RPM's is a leap of faith since neither you nor Terrasoft
built them. So..., proceed with caution.

If you take the leap you will find that Xine has a bunch of dependencies
that are satisfied by loading the following:

        aalib-1.4.0-5.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        aalib-devel-1.4.0-5.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        caca-utils-0.9-1.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        imlib2-1.1.0-2.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        imlib2-devel-1.1.0-2.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libcaca-devel-0.9-1.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libdvdcss-1.2.8-4.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libdvdcss-devel-1.2.8-4.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libfame-0.9.1-1.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libfame-devel-0.9.1-1.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        libtheora-devel-1.0-0.alpha3.2.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        xine-0.99.2-1.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        xine-lib-1.0.0-0.17.rc8.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm
        xine-lib-devel-1.0.0-0.17.rc8.0.yd4.fr.ppc.rpm

Note that the precompiled version of xine is 0.99.2, whereas the latest
and greatest is 0.99.3.

I took the leap [:-)] and got xine to work. I found a few things that
annoyed me:
(1) moving the mouse over xine controls did not bring up explanation
dialogs,
(2) the help files are missing,
(3) if you opt not to display the "video window" you cannot minimize the
application,
(4) xine segfaulted a couple of times while I was randomly exploring the
controls.

What I did about it
-------------------
I downloaded the SRPM from freshrpms.net, unpacked it, and took a look
at the SPEC file. Having identified what source file was being used,  I
downloaded the latest tarball from xinehq.de. I modified the SPEC file
to use the new tarball, and kicked off "rpmbuild -bb xine.spec'. The
build completed without incident.

The newly built version resolved issue (1). Issues (2) and (3) remain. I
have not yet experienced a segfault. Time will tell.


-Joseph


-- 
joseph_sacco[at]comcast[dot]net