xine Project Announces First GPL Sorenson Video Decoder

[ Thanks to Miguel Freitas for this link. ]

The xine team has released the version 0.9.11 of their GPL'd media player application. xine is capable of playing back a wide variety of media formats including DVD, MPEG, AVI, ASF, Apple Quicktime (MOV) and others. Notable in this release is the first free software implementation of the Sorenson Video algorithm, used to encode video streams in many Quicktime files.

Changes since last release:

• Sorenson video 1 decoder (SVQ1)
• sync with ffmpeg cvs
• RoQ DPCM audio decoder
• some endianess and 64bit machine fixes
• better quality using linearblend filter
• new FILM (CPK) demuxer
• new RoQ demuxer
• new QuickTime demuxer
• DXR3 overlay mode fixed
• DXR3 support for libfame 0.8.10 and above
• fixes for transport streams demuxer
• VIDIX video out driver (experimental)
• TV fullscreen support using nvtvd

Note that Sorenson decoder only covers the SVQ1 variant and not the more recent SV3 variant used to encode the Star Wars Episode II trailers. Also, the decoder does not handle the QDesign sound formats that are commonly used in Sorenson videos. (However it seems that someone is actively working on those!)

For those wondering about the "Lara Croft Community edition" name, it comes the fact that Tomb Raider trailer was the first Sorenson video ever decoded under Linux. Episode I trailers are also playable with xine.

For Download Information

Related Stories:

• Linux.com: Playing DVDs with Xine(Feb 22, 2001)