Xine is a free, GPL-licensed multimedia playback engine. This high performance software plays back CDs, DVDs and VCDs. It also supports a large number of multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, MP3 etc.

This easy to use and portable Xine software plays multimedia files from local disk drives as well as displays multimedia files streamed over the Internet.

Xine is based on a modular, advanced, multithreaded architecture composed of xine engine, input plugin, output plugin, decoder plugin and post effect plugin.

Xine consists of a number of features :

• Xine is free, fast, portable and reusable
• It is a shared library
• It has a powerful API that is used by many applications for video processing and play backing purpose

Xine is compatible with a number of operating systems like:

• FreeBSD (x86)
• Solaris (sparc and x86)
• Irix (mips)
• Darwin/MacOS X (ppc) via the fink project

Xine’s support for the following platforms is in progress:

• MS Windows (partially working and committed to CVS)
• HPUX (patches received)
• OpenBSD (patches received)
• OS/2 (external site)

Some external websites provide plugins for xine as well as binary packages.