Xine: an excellent media player for an 18-year-old laptop

[mikey777Member]

Recently, my 18-year-old Asus X71Q (see spec in signature) had an upgrade from v21 to v26 of antiX 64-bit, using a fresh install recently. For now, I’m using the legacy antiX kernel (5.10.254) that comes pre-packaged with v26. AntiX still runs well on this machine for day-to-day admin tasks and for watching videos, but it initially struggled with streaming YouTube videos and TV programmes, even at the 360p or 480p.

In antiX-26, under Menu –> Applications –> Multimedia, there are three media players pre-installed, i.e. Celluloid, MPV and Xine. AntiX appears to use Celluloid by default and this is where my laptop initially struggled with streaming. It even struggled with MPV, which previously ran smoothly with antiX-21. I tried all three players and Xine came out on top, without any reservations. As long as you’re not a stickler for HD (1080p) or 780p quality, and you don’t mind streaming with 480p, then it’s fine. The other caveat here is that you can’t multitask, i.e. have other apps open at the same time as Xine, as the CPU wont cope with the extra load.

So if your old laptop is struggling with streaming videos with antiX-26, then use Xine. You can delete the other multimedia players using the following in terminal:
sudo apt remove --purge celluloid* mpv*

When you come to updating apps generally, use:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Initially I made a mistake by using:
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
which installed vlc player, which didn’t help as it’s an even worse choice for a geriatric machine …

Hoping this might be useful for someone who still wishes to stream with an old machine.

• This topic was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[Brian MasinickModerator]

I don’t usually have any problems with video, but you’re right, Xine has been a very good tool for a long time. I’ll see what I have installed and even though I can handle the others, I’ll put in Xine (and possibly remove the others after sampling a few files I happen to have available. Thanks for the recommendation!

EDIT: I do have xine installed and the others removed. On the system instance I’m using at the moment I do not have any video content installed, but I temporarily mounted a file system with video content and xine arguably works as well or better than other alternatives for me too; thanks again!

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[mikey777Member]

You’re most welcome Brian.
By the way, many thanks for your comments on dinit, that I read elsewhere on this forum in a thread about members’ init preferences. Your positive comments encouraged me to try it on the Asus (my oldest/slowest machine) and I have to say I prefer it over runit. The most significant difference, compared to runit, is that it is very much faster to boot and shutdown. It appears to run well with all my usual day-to-day apps, though I haven’t done any printing with it yet. Hopefully that works efficiently too.

Cheers, have a good day 🙂

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[sybokMember]

My quick search for Xine: the Wikipedia links to Sourceforge which seems rather dated (2020 – the newest news); another link from man pages points to Sourceforge again, this time seeming more alive: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xine/

Do you have any consise resource to learn more about the player?

BTW, I usually – if the HW permits – stick with the (somewhat) bloated VLC for ease of use (and me being accustomed to it) though I alternated with ‘mpv’ on some old machines.

[PPCMember]

I’m partly to “blame” for Xine being on antiX, since I recommended it to anticapitalista, and to everyone with very low powered machines, here in the forum.

The best reason why I recommend it is that I can perfectly watch local HD video files (in most codecs) in my 32bits laptop using it.
For people with not that old machines, MPV and/or more modern players/front-ends for MPV will do.

I don’t mind if it’s as old as dirt… if it works fine 🙂

P.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by PPC.

[mikey777Member]

sybok wrote:

… Do you have any consise resource to learn more about the player?

No, I don’t sybok.
I tried it simply because it was already there and ready to use on my new antiX-26 install, and it was the only media player that worked out of the three that were there and that was good enough for me. As PPC said “I don’t mind if it’s as old as dirt… if it works fine :-)”

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[mikey777Member]

PPC wrote:

I’m partly to “blame” for Xine being on antiX, since I recommended it to anticapitalista, and to everyone with very low powered machines, here in the forum.

Many thanks PPC, for recommending it to anticapitalista – a wise move for old machines :-))
What is the make/model of laptop you use Xine on, and with which antiX version?

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[sybokMember]

@PPC:

I don’t mind if it’s as old as dirt… if it works fine 🙂

I second that (in general).
With SW, I try to be more careful about outdated stuff which can open some door one would like to keep closed…
@mikey777:

No, I don’t sybok.

OK.

[Brian MasinickModerator]

mikey777 wrote:

You’re most welcome Brian.
By the way, many thanks for your comments on dinit, that I read elsewhere on this forum in a thread about members’ init preferences. Your positive comments encouraged me to try it on the Asus (my oldest/slowest machine) and I have to say I prefer it over runit. The most significant difference, compared to runit, is that it is very much faster to boot and shutdown. It appears to run well with all my usual day-to-day apps, though I haven’t done any printing with it yet. Hopefully that works efficiently too.

Cheers, have a good day 🙂

Yeah, dinit has been a REALLY pleasant surprise! I’ve been using it on occasion since February 2024 when our friend @ProwlerGr first joined our forum and presented the idea of “init-diversity” to us then. @CalciumSodium, @ProwlerGr, and a few others that I don’t immediately recall without referencing our thread from TWO YEARS ago set out to experiment with this stuff.

Though the solution was just a “proof of concept” at the time, it had great promise, and I liked dinit even back then. It turns out that out of the many alternatives to systemd, dinit is one of the newest ones. The “66” service manager that works with s6 is also relatively new, enough so that there are no GUI-based tools that I’m aware of to work with the 66 services other than the tool that was added to the Control Centre – that’s probably an “opportunity” for additional work in the future, but back to dinit – wow, just between January and our release in March the development team did a REALLY good job implementing services for each of the init alternatives. The result is that the original init – sysVinit – while it STILL works great after all these years, it doesn’t really have a fancy GUI either, though it does have an easy to use check box menu to select or deselect the desired services. I suppose you could call it “GUI” if we put a graphical menu box around it, but I call that a native screen-based tool.

Dinit, on the other hand, now has a way to enable and disable services right from our own implementation of these services and I noticed the improvement earlier THIS year, after I’d tried this one more than two years ago, but you’re right; it’s neck and neck with runit. I hasten to add, however, that we have ALSO greatly improved our runit services, which are now actually all running completely in runit, whereas for the past 5-6 years we’ve actually been running many (most/all) of the service creation elements from sysVinit, so it wasn’t a true, 100% runit service, whereas in antiX 26, it’s now as far as I can tell a completely runit based group of services that complement the runit process initiation, so both runit and dinit have benefited from this work!

Again we have @ProwlerGr to thank along with @anticapitalista and the other members of the development team for their outstanding implementation of these services. While we did learn a LOT by looking at the work being done in other distributions, in the end, the final results in OUR OWN distribution take the BEST work from other efforts, add our own integration and configuration efforts to it, resulting in what I believe is the finest multi-init effort in the greater Linux ecosystem!

I may be biased, but if there are any efforts that offer five or more init alternatives weaved as smoothly into another distribution, I’d love to see it! I still don’t think it’d be possible to be more lean and efficient than ours is, even if there IS another such effort out there!

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[Brian MasinickModerator]

PPC wrote:

I’m partly to “blame” for Xine being on antiX, since I recommended it to anticapitalista, and to everyone with very low powered machines, here in the forum.

The best reason why I recommend it is that I can perfectly watch local HD video files (in most codecs) in my 32bits laptop using it.
For people with not that old machines, MPV and/or more modern players/front-ends for MPV will do.

I don’t mind if it’s as old as dirt if it works fine 🙂

P.

I’m GLAD you mentioned it, @PPC because I ran a few of my own tests again just yesterday and confirmed what you said:

1) Xine always seems to work just fine.
2) since Xine and I am as old or older than dirt, it “fits” with a lean, efficient antiX solution!
3) we offer the Xine Media Player in our Software Package Installer, so it’s convenient too!

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[Brian MasinickModerator]

https://xine.sourceforge.net/ is the official site, and you’re right:

2020-12-06: Release
xine-lib 1.2.11

Object oriented programming in C

https://xine.sourceforge.net/hackersguide#id324430

To me, this one makes a great deal of sense for our low resource, efficient software.
C++, C#, Java, or some other language at the core of the engine would be more resource intensive.
This still works very well!

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[mikey777Member]

Since starting this thread, I’ve attempted to watch YouTube music videos (live recordings of Alan Parsons Project, Pink Floyd, etc), on a single-core Samsung 10″ netbook (see signature), using the Xine media player + Librewolf browser setup. There aren’t any issues listening to the music, but as one might expect the YT videos only work at 144p or 240p to maintain synchronicity between video and audio. I tried other browsers with Xine (e.g. Falkon, Firefox-ESR), but they were poorer than Librewolf.

Has anyone any experience of a browser that might allow an improvement in video streaming quality (higher than 240p, e.g. 480p would be nice), or am I just hitting the limits here, with what a 1.6Ghz single-core CPU can do? When the YT videos are playing, conky shows there’s around 0.7GB of unused RAM available, out of 1.92GB total. Yes, the setup is running on an SSD, codecs already installed and DRM checked in Librewolf’s settings.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[anticapitalistaForum Admin]

Best to play videos without a browser on such a limited machine.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[mikey777Member]

anticapitalista wrote:

Best to play videos without a browser on such a limited machine.

Thanks anticapitalista – after you mentioned doing away with the browser I tried what you suggested …
I downloaded one of the YT videos at three levels of quality for comparison, i.e. 1080p, 720p and 480p, using Easy Youtube Video Downloader Express (from Firefox’s ‘extensions & addons’); video playback at 1080p was outside the Samsung netbook’s single-core CPU capability, but 720p was fine and is very respectable on a 10″ screen – really pleased about that 🙂

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by mikey777.

64-bit antix26-full (zzz-IceWM, dinit) installed on the following [year of manufacture in brackets]:
[2008] Asus X71Q (7SC002) 17", 2 x CPU Intel T3200@2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2010] Samsung N145 Plus (JP04UK) 10", 1 x CPU Intel Atom N450@1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2012] Lenovo B580 (4377) 15", 2 x CPU i3-2328M@2.2Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
[2017] Dell Latitude 5480 14", 4 x CPU i5-6300U@2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics

[Brian MasinickModerator]

@mikey777 I agree with @anticapitalista about playing videos without a browser on limited hardware.

For those who have a bit more hardware, try using Ungoogled Chromium as your Web Browser instead of others. I just listened to a couple of videos while in Ungoogled Chromium, so it works, meaning you can listen to or watch videos in the same browser you use regularly, but it doesn’t constantly “call back” to it’s “parent”, watching everything you do.

--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page

[Author]

Posts