XMovie User's Guide

XMovie was originally written as a simple, faster alternative to Broadcast 2000 for playing uncompressed TV shows with stereo sound. Today it supports the following formats:

MPEG-1 system streams
MPEG-2 system streams
MP3 audio
MP2 audio
AC3 audio
WAV audio
AIFF audio
MPEG-1 video
MPEG-2 video
DVD
Quicktime video:
Motion JPEG A
Uncompressed RGB
Component video
Progressive JPEG
PNG
YUV 4:2:0
YUV 4:2:2
DV
Quicktime audio:
Twos complement
IMA4
ulaw

Menus

OPTIONS
PLAY EVERY FRAME
Forces every frame to be played regardless of synchronization.
FULL SCREEN
Toggles between fullscreen and windowed output. Remember to use the f key to toggle back.
ORIGINAL SIZE
Size the frame so that horizontal resolution is 1:1.
SYNCHRONIZE USING SOFTWARE
Try to guess the synchronization instead of locking on the soundcard.
SETTINGS
Display aspect ratio - Determines the aspect ratio of the intended screen size by stretching pixels. Usually either 4:3 or 16:9. Can optionally be disabled so that pixels are always square.

Letterbox aspect ratio - For a letterboxed movie this determines what the movie's aspect ratio would be if the letterbox was cropped, usually 2.2:1. Then by enabling Crop letterbox you can save CPU time and desktop area by displaying only the part of the screen containing the movie.

Enable MMX - MMX uses a lossy algorithm developed by Intel

Audio Priority - Some people think the audio interferes with smooth video. You can set the nice value for the audio here. A nice of 0 puts audio on the same priority as video. A nice of 20 puts audio in the lowest priority.

Preload size - CD-ROM drives can't handle seeking in Quicktime movies so preload size determines a maximum number of bytes ahead of the current file pointer the drive should read sequentially before resorting to a SEEK_SET. This speeds up Quicktime playback from CD-ROM drives.

AUDIO
Selects among the audio streams.
VIDEO
Selects among the video streams.

Quicktime Info

Although not developed by Microsoft, Quicktime is really a wrapper for the various compression standards out there with 64 bit filesystem support. What you know as Quicktime 4 is really the same as any other version of Quicktime. Quicktime 4 wraps two additional compression standards which aren't present in the previous versions but the method it uses for wrapping is identical to Quicktime 2.

The Quicktime support in XMovie wasn't designed to play movies from the internet. Internet movies are encoded using the two compression standards: Sorenson Vision and QDesign Music. Apple licensed these compression standards for their own use after Microsoft introduced Windows Media Player in 1998 to avert competition, hence it is impossible for anyone but Apple to use Sorenson Vision or QDesign Music.

Your primary use of XMovie is uncompressed Quicktime movies that you create yourself, as in using your computer as a VCR.

Low bitrate MPEG Info

Be sure to disable MMX in settings->preferences. This improves quality.

DVD Info

Kernel upgrade

XMovie can be used as a rudimentary DVD player by playing the IFO files one by one. 50% of the DVD support in Linux is integrated in the kernel. The following kernel is known to play DVD's

Kernel 2.4.1

The files you want to play off of DVDs are .IFO files. Each of these is a movie. The IFO format is an ongoing reverse engineering project by Thomas Mirlacher so most DVD's play and some don't.

IDE bug

The IDE drivers set the maximum CD-ROM size to 700MB. Attempting to load a DVD results in "attempt to seek beyond end of device" errors and crashes the program. The solution is to reboot and make sure the DVD is the first disk mounted on the CD-ROM drive. The kernel will accept DVD sizes until you insert the first small CD in the drive. Another thing that seems to work is SCSI emulation.