xfmedia

About

Xfmedia is a simple, easy-to-use media player based on the xine engine. The GTK+ GUI focuses on playing and managing audio files, but, being based on xine, supports video as well.

Requirements

Xfmedia itself relies on one piece of software for all its audio/video work: xine-lib, which has various dependencies and requirements depending on which media formats you wish to be able to play; see the xine website for details. Version 1.0rc8 or later is required. The GUI requires GTK+ version 2.6.0 or greater and libxfcegui4 from the Xfce 4.2.0 release (or newer). Also required is libexo. Either version 0.2 or 0.3 will be sufficient. In order to enable remote control support, D-BUS version 0.23 or greater is required, though it is recommended that you use 0.60 or greater. TagLib is optional, but required for file metadata editing.

Downloads

The current release version of Xfmedia is 0.9.2.

Source: xfmedia-0.9.2.tar.bz2 (SHA1 sum, PGP signature)

Xfmedia is beta-quality, and likely has bugs. Previous releases, a ChangeLog, and a NEWS file can be found in /files/xfmedia/. Most bleeding-edge development on Xfmedia is currently occuring on the ‘experimental’ branch, which currently doesn’t even compile. You may check out the unstable version of Xfmedia by issuing the following command:

git clone git://git.xfce.org/archive/xfmedia

If you really want to try the experimental version, feel free, but be warned that it may fail to compile, trash your data, make bitter coffee, or insult your mother.

You can also view the git tree using the web interface.

Important: The development tree now requires the xfce4-dev-tools package, available here.

Installation

For release tarballs, the usual should do it:

./configure
make
make install

For git checkouts, you must first run ./autogen.sh (instead of ./configure). If configure or autogen.sh fails, please read the output and try to correct any problems before reporting a bug. Many configure-time problems are due to missing -devel packages on systems that use binary package management (RPM, .deb, etc.). If using svn, please ensure that you’re using autoconf 2.53 (or higher) and automake 1.8 (or higher). If you are on a BSD-based system, please use GNU make (often installed as gmake) if you have problems with the default system make. If you encounter errors during build-time, please report only the end of the build output where the error occurred, but make sure to paste at least from the last gcc/libtool command that caused the error. Otherwise I have no idea what failed to build. If in doubt, more information is better.

Running

Xfmedia comes with a GUI frontend called xfmedia, which should be relatively self-explanatory to use. There are a few command-line options available; type xfmedia –help from a terminal for details.

Xfmedia can be controlled remotely using the xfmedia-remote command. See the –help option for details.

Screenshots

Xfmedia with playlist expanded (06 Apr 2005)	Xfmedia with playlist collapsed (06 Apr 2005)
Xfmedia file info window (06 Apr 2005)	Xfmedia Mediamarks editor (06 Apr 2005)
Xfmedia Keybindings editor (06 Apr 2005)

Contributing

Please report all bugs on Xfce Bugzilla. I can often be found in #xfmedia on irc.freenode.net as kelnos if you’d like to chat.

I welcome all contributions, though if you’re planning on adding a feature, you probably want to drop me a note first to make sure I’m not working on it already, and that it’s something that I want in Xfmedia. All patches submitted should be against current svn trunk; I generally don’t have the time to try to merge patches made against the current release version. Patches should be submitted in unified diff format (-u option to diff). You can easily make a patch by simply using the svn diff command.

I’d also like to see Xfmedia translated into different languages. If you’d like to translate Xfmedia into a new language, please see the Xfce i18n site for details.