Farewell, xine

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I've been talking about removing the xine renderer for 6 months now. I don't do this lightly--generally we want to add features, not remove them. However, we're a really small team of developers working on Miro and one of the things I'm focusing on for the Miro 2.6 development cycle is to reduce and simplify wherever we can so that we can focus on the work ahead of us. Also, the gstreamer folks are doing a fantastic job and that project is really coming along. I feel very confident that switching to gstreamer is a good move.

Today is the day I did the deed. As of c1c6f33, the gtk-x11 platform of Miro no longer uses the xine renderer. This checkin removes all the xine code from the codebase.

A while back, I threw together a VLC renderer that mostly works. Other renderers can be built in the same way--the infrastructure is there for anyone to create new renderers and ship them as separate packages.

Even though this is a good move, I do realize it leaves some people out in the cold. If you are interested in championing the xine renderer and starting a project to build and maintain it, let me know and I'll do what I can to help out.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.