Xine is an open source, high-performance, portable and reusable multimedia playback engine and video playback application for GNU/Linux operating systems. It is also compatible with the BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X platforms.

Key features include a skinnable GUI, ability to download and install new skins from the Internet, modern navigation controls, including seeking, pause, fast, slow, next/previous chapter, LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) support, On Screen Display (OSD), DVD-Video and external subtitles, as well as DVD/VCD menus.

It features audio and subtitle channel selection, Closed Caption support, settings for adjusting brightness, audio volume, contrast, hue and saturation, support for playlists, image snapshots, audio resampling, aspect ratio changing, and full screen display.

The project is comprised of the xine-lib and xine-ui packages, the latter being a graphical user interface (GUI) for the first one. xine-lib is a shared library that's easy to use, yet powerful enough to be used by many other applications for smooth video playback and video processing purposes.

While supported video file formats include MPEG, OGG Vorbis, AVI, ASF, WMV, MP4, MOV, MPV, M2V, CPK, ROQ, DV, YUV4MPEG2, SMJPEG, the application also supports the MP3, AC3, DTS, PCM, WMA, FLAC, NSF, Speex, and OGG audio file formats.

The application includes the XVideo, XShm, OpenGL, VDPAU, SDL, ASCII, Syncfb, VIDIX and pgx64 video drivers, as well as support for the OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, ESD, aRts, sndio, Irix Audio and Sun Audio sound servers.

It also supports raw TCP socket, MMS (Microsoft Media), RTSP/PNM (Real Media), HTTP, network protocols for webcasting and streaming of multimedia files. The DXR3 (EM8300), DVB (Digital TV) cards, Video4Linux (V4L) and WinTV-PVR 250/350 PCI multimedia hardware boards are supported.

Xine is a decent multimedia playback engine for the open source ecosystem. However, it doesn’t support encrypted or locked DVD-Video discs, because of legal reasons.