6. Watching AVI files with Xine

Since version 0.3.6 Xine has been able to play Windows AVI files out of the box. To do this it uses the Windows driver files (DLLs) to play some files. By default, Xine expects to find these in the PREFIX/lib/win32/ directory, where PREFIX is the directory you installed Xine into. If you didn't specify any --prefix option to ./configure, this will be /usr/local. This path can be overridden in the Xine configuration dialogue box.

A tar-ball containing DLLs to watch most AVI files is available from http://bpinaud.dyndns.org/video/w32codec.tar.bz2 and http://divx.euro.ru/ (the file is called binaries.zip). Note that this is only available on Intel-like platforms.

Xine also supports the decoding of DivX ;-) and MJPEG avi files natively using an embedded copy of the ffmpeg library. Xine attempts to use this decoder in preference as it also may work on non-x86 platforms.

6.1 What to do if Xine crashes when I try to play AVI files

The Win32 codec (AVI file support) is still experimental. It should work OK if your system meets these requirements:

• The Xv driver is working.
• The AVI file contains video and audio streams supported by the DLLs below.
• You have the proper DLLs in /usr/lib/win32/

but it may crash for no specific reason at the moment. There are known problems with files which have strange audio streams.