Broken Xine
I haven’t used xine in a couple of years. At one time xine was my work horse, playing movie DVDs, DVD ISOs, and DVB (ATSC) TV. I decided to brush the dust and test the app again.
Initially I tried watching a TV station. Once upon a time the command was simple:
xine dvb://${CALL LETTERS}
Except this command no longer succeeded. I also saw a message in the viewer window:
Sorry, No valid channels.conf found
I checked ~/.xine/channels.conf.
The file was still there with a date stamp from a couple of years ago.
Adding the --verbose option revealed that xine was looking for the channels.conf file in ~/.config/xine-lib/channels.conf.
Searching online revealed nothing. Browsing the source code from xine-lib 1.1.21, which came packaged with Slackware 14.1, and xine-lib 1.2.6, which is packaged with 14.2, showed that somewhere along the way the location of channels.conf was hard-coded to the new location. In previous versions the location defaulted to ~/.xine/channels.conf but could be modified by the user with the xine config media.dvb.channels_conf option.
The media.dvb.channels_conf option is fully stripped from the code.
No, really. Hard-coded.
Yet Xine looks for the user's config file in ~/.xine/ and stores xine-ui_old_playlist.tox in that directory.
I created the ~/.config/xine-lib/ directory and sym linked channels.conf from the long-standing location in ~/.xine/channels.conf.
Thereafter Xine played the desired TV station.
For about a minute that is. Then Xine crashed hard by just plain disappearing.
Once upon a time I used to play DVD movie ISO images using the dvd media resource location (MRL):
xine dvd:///path/to/image.iso
This command no longer worked.
Xine would not play an actual movie DVD.
MPlayer and SMPlayer worked just fine with DVDs, ISOs, and DVB.
Xine never had a pretty interface or GUI, but with nominal memory muscle could be mastered. More importantly, the software worked.
The Year of the Linux Desktop awaits.
No, not really. Free/libre software continues to be a personal playground for developers. They change things for the same reason dogs and cats lick themselves — simply because they can.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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