2004.02_Kaffeine-Easy to Use and Control, Multimedia Player.pdf

LINUX USER

KTools

Music and Movie Time

Individual audio and video files, CDs,

VCDs, and even DVDs – the Kaffeine

player can handle whatever your

heart desires, assuming your com-

puter has the right codecs installed.

Providing a simple clean interface

makes the player very functional, so

you can spend your time listening to

and watching your files, rather than

changing controls and settings.

BY STEFANIE TEUFEL

end soundcards, DVD drives, and

powerful CPUs are easily capable

of replacing standalone DVD and CD

players. All you need is some software

support for the whole gamut of multime-

dia madness. Kaffeine by Jürgen Kofler is

a particularly promising candidate to

help with this role. The Xine -based [1]

player can handle more or less anything

you throw at it – CDs, DVDs, VCDs, or

AVI, MOV , WMV , and MP3 files on disk.

This all round talent can even play the

multimedia streams straight off a broad-

band Internet without any fuss

whatsoever.

The current version is available from

the project site at http://sourceforge.net/

projects/kaffeine . To keep Kaffeine

happy, you will need xine-libs version

1.0beta4 or newer. This package and its

dependencies ensure that you have the

required codecs in place.

If you cannot find a binary package for

your distribution in the download sec-

tion of the site, not to worry. Just follow

the usual three steps configure; make;

make install to compile Kaffeine your-

self. The program also requires you to

add the root directories for your KDE

software to the KDEDIRS environment

variable, for example:

feine, it asks you if you would like to use

the plugin, $ KDEDIR/lib/kaffeineplu-

gin/kaffeineplugin.so , with Mozilla. And

if you say yes, Kaffeine automatically

links the plugin to $HOME/.mozilla/plu-

gins .

Playlist

When you see the welcome screen wait-

ing for files to play (as shown in Figure

1), you will also notice that a tiny CD

icon has appeared in your menu bar. You

can right click the icon to pop up the

export KDEDIRS=/opt/kde3:/usr/ U

local/kde

If the automatic build insists on search-

ing for libfreetype.la in the /usr/local/lib

directory, rather than in /usr/lib where

the file is located (and this is what hap-

pened on a Red Hat system), you can use

a symbolic link as a quick workaround

for this problem.

After installing Kaffeine, you can

either launch it via the KDE menu entry,

Multimedia / Kaffeine (a xine-based

Media Player.) , or simply type the com-

mand, kaffeine & (adding the path if

required). When you first launch Kaf-

KTools

In this column we present tools, month by

month, which have proven to be especially

useful when working under KDE, solve a

problem which otherwise is deliberately

ignored, or are just some of the nicer things

in life, which – once discovered – you would

not want to do without.

Figure 1: Kaffeine saying “Hello”

February 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Kaffeine

T oday’s computers with their high-

KTools

LINUX USER

Figure 3: Kaffeine can handle XMMS playlists

cut, [F]. The program hides the menu

and control panel in Minimal mode , but

you can still access the program via the

dropdown that appears when you right

click.

Some files (AVIs in particular) need

Deinterlace to play correctly; select the

menu item with this label to enable the

feature. Thanks to the Aspect ratio fea-

ture you can use auto to view the file at

its original size, or select an aspect ratio

from 4:3 , 16:9 , and 1:1 . Zoom in (short-

cut [Z]) zooms the video image up to

400 percent, Zoom out reverses this

process and Zoom off switches the zoom

feature off.

If you want to repeat a track endlessly,

select Play / Endless Mode . You can also

opt for a random playlist by selecting

Random .

Apart from playing movies, Kaffeine

also provides a snapshot facility that

allows you to capture stills from your

favorite scenes. You can access this fea-

ture via File / Store snapshot ; snapshot

Figure 5: The interface provides transparent

access to Xine options

Figure 2: The dropdown menu provides access to

the major functions

images can be saved as PNG, BMP XMB

files.

menu shown in Figure 2. The menu pro-

vides controls for the player, allowing

you to Open File(s) , or Playlist s.

Kaffeine can use M3U lists created by

XMMS or other programs via Playlist /

File / Import (see Figure 3). It even han-

dles Noatun playlists, and PLS or ASX

files without any complaint.

The quickest way to feed your player is

to drag & drop a file onto the disc icon.

You can even drag & drop multiple files

to pass complete directories or playlists

to Kaffeine.

Incidentally, you can specify a playlist

or directory as a command line switch,

as in:

A Question of Preference

If the movie image is not quite to your

liking, take a look at the Video settings

(see Figure 4). You can use slider con-

trols to change the Hue , Saturation ,

Brightness or Contrast . And if the sound-

track is not in sync with the image,

simply change the “ A udio- V ideo”-Offset.

If you have tried Xine, you are

probably familiar with the configuration

facilities that this program offers. Kaf-

feine provides a graphical user interface

via Settings / Configure Xine (see Figure

5) that allows you to configure the

player’s parameters by pointing and

clicking. If you change the audio or

video drivers in this interface, you will

need to relaunch the program to apply

your changes.

Kaffeine not only has a convincing

graphical user interface, but a plethora of

useful command line switches. For

example, the --device option allows you

to specify the path to your audio or video

CD, and even stipulate the input plugin.

The following command:

kaffeine /your/mp3/directory

to tell Kaffeine to parse the files in this

directory and add them to a playlist. The

plugin also allows you to open multime-

dia files using Konqueror.

And Action… in Thumbnail or

Full Screen Mode

Kaffeine can provide any image format,

color, and size you might request. You

can use the View menu to choose

between Fullscreen and Window mode . If

you tend to toggle between these two

modes, simply use the keyboard short-

kaffeine --device /dev/cdrom VCD

Figure 4: Slider controls provide more hue and

contrast

plays a video CD in the CD-ROM drive.

To add a track to your current playlist,

simply pass the --enqueue mytrack

option to Kaffeine, and the program will

comply by adding the track. You can

access AVI files with separate subtitle

files from the command line as follows:

kaffeine film.avi subtitlefile.xxx .

GLOSSARY

MOV: Short for “Movie”, refers to video files in

Apple’s Quicktime format.

WMV: The “Windows Media Video” format is

part of the Windows media architecture and

competition for Quicktime.

Symbolic link: The command “ln -s

path/to/file /newpath/newname” creates a

link to the first file using the name in the

second parameter, and typically at another

location in the filesystem tree, without actu-

ally copying the file’s content. Deleting the

original file, leaves the link pointing at a black

hole; this is referred to as a broken symlink.

$: Shell variables such as HOME, KDEDIR, or

KDEDIRS can be output, if you prefix a dollar

sign to their names.

■

INFO

[1] Xine video player: http://xinehq.de/

www.linux-magazine.com

February 2004

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: