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  New Release of Kaffeine Media Player
Multimedia Posted by Giorgos Gousios on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @13:58
from the brain-stimulation dept.
The Kaffeine development team, lead by Juergen Kofler, is proud to present a new release (0.4.2) of Kaffeine. Kaffeine is a xine-based media player. What sets it apart from other similar players is the fact that it tries to be an all-around solution by exposing xine's capabilities on an easy to use interface. Kaffeine supports all types of video and audio files and also VCDs, DVDs and media URLs. Almost all supported multimedia files can be played by point-and-click. In KDE 3.2, Kaffeine can also be controlled by a remote control. It is lightweight, starts fast and features a nice playlist.

For the latest release the emphasis has been put on stability rather than on the implementation of new features. Some very annoying bugs where fixed, including some problems with control panel, various crashes and some interoperability bugs with KDE 3.2. Despite the emphasis on stability there are also some new features such as a new setup dialog, better embedding in Konqueror and support for multiple external subtitle files that can be changed on the fly while playing. The new Konqueror embedding can be seen in action when visiting http://www.apple.com/trailers, the "coffee bean" button starts playback in Kaffeine externally.

Other new features include:

  • all meta/length information and CDDB entries are read on loading
  • navigation in DVD menus with arrow keys and enter
  • automatic resize feature: main window will be adapted to the video frame size
  • playlist statusbar shows total entries and total play time
  • file dialogs: remembers last directory; filter for all supported media formats
  • the --device switch sets DVD device too, path will no longer be saved in the xine configuration
  • parser for ram (real-time) playlists
  • possibility to turn equalizer on/off
  • support for audiocd:// URLs (audiocd kio-slave)
  • Konqueror servicemenus
  • translations available in 16 languages

The development of Kaffeine started about a year ago, but Kaffeine was mainly left into the unknown until major distributions (mainly SUSE but also others) chose it as their default media player. Since then, progress and addoption was very fast ( 1st place in kde-apps.org multimedia apps, activity monitor on sourceforge). The current core development team is still very small, but patches and bug reports are coming from various users. If you want to help, please report bugs to our bug-tracker or use our mailing lists. If you want to compile yourself you will be interested in the Kaffeine source code. Binary packages and ports will soon be available for all Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD. Please check our download page regularly.



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  Related Links
 ·   Articles on Multimedia
 ·   Also by Giorgos Gousios
 ·   Contact author

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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
I love Kaffeine!
by fault on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @14:39
I've used Kaffeine for nearly six months now. It is a wonderful app, and I think it is probably the first real competition to Windows Media Player that we have on Linux now. It's not that other players don't have similiar features, but Kaffeine has got the interface right. Similar situation with k3b being the first real serious contender to Nero.

Great stuff!
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why not move it to kde's cvs
by anon on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @14:41
To kdeextragear? It's a mature app but could probably benefit from added translations and contributors that being in kde-cvs would help in. As with all extra-gear apps, there would be independent releases of course. It has helped many other larger kde apps, like kmplayer, k3b, etc..
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Way to go!
by Alex on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @15:47
Kaffeine is definitely my favourite media player, it's also the most versatile one. The only major complaint I have is that it doesn't have cool visual plugins like TOtem, but anyway Totem is too weak in other areas so I use Kaffeine.
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need more kaffeine!
by LMCBoy on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @16:19
I like kaffeine a lot, kudos to the team!

I just gave a presentation using KPresenter, and I had use an external player to play some animations. What would it take to get kaffeine to embed its KPart into a KPresenter slide? That would be really cool.

Anyways, thanks a lot!
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KMPlayer
by Dan on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @18:14
This sounds extremely promising, excellent.

I thought I'd mention that KMPlayer ( http://www.xs4all.nl/~jjvrieze/kmplayer.html ) is also an excellent frontend to mplayer and xine, with file/dvd/tvcard interface, does recording with ffmpeg, it's capable of being embedded into konqi too, and it's been around for absolutely ages and is therefore solid.
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Kaffine interface ...
by Old guy on Thursday 25/Mar/2004, @23:05
I like Kaffine but it's starting to look like the GIMP interface. I dislike the fact that when running GIMP there are a bunch of GIMP windows on my task bar. I get confuse and clutter my taskbak.

If you look closely, Kaffine launch in one windows and another windows is the playlist. The taskbar showed two windows. I prefer that it only shows one window.
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mplayer vs xine
by beware_of_the_donbot on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @00:51
mplayer is far superior to xine.. that's why kaffeine will never replace any mediaplayer. If you want an KDE interface for your mediaplayer, try KMPlayer. It needs still some more development, but so does kaffeine.
Try mplayer with --enable-gui. And see what ye like best.
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no info on kde-apps.org
by anonymous on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @03:11
No update Kaffeine on kde-apps.org.
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hmm
by Bert on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @05:29
Waht about software patents etc. Do I have to compile manually and enable illegal compiler option or can I just install a rpm.
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Nice work
by macewan on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @13:47
Upgraded kaff* this morning. Works like a charm with embedded quicktime in konqueror.

:)

this is SuSE 9 Pro with KDE 3.2.1
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?? ???? ?? ?????? ?????? ??_??_? ?? ??? ??? ??...
by ????? on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @15:15
???? ????? ?? ??? ??, KDE ?? ??? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ??? ??????, ??????, ??? ????? ?? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ???? (???) ???? ????

KDE ?? ?? universal media player ?? ???????? ??? ???? ??? ????? ???
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KDE Stinks with Media Players
by rizwaan on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @15:39
It is really frustrating to see that there is not media player in KDE which can be called a media player at all! Because all those so called KDE media player can't play which they are supposed to play.

Noatun is crap:
interface is really ugly and insanely not-useful. Only good thing is that it allows docking in tray. it can't play all media types.

Kaboodle is more crap (though faster than noatun)

Juk is only good at playlist. no video is supported hence crap again!

Aktion was good but for videos only.

KMplayer - it is just a frontend to the great mplayer program, but it has a crappy interface.

Can't you all not-so-good programmers (if you were all good then, a good media player would be in existence) join to create ONE GOOD media player for KDE which can play all media types as supported by mplayer and xine.

Can't you just make a good looking media player like "Windows Media Player 9", yes Windows media player look better than all the KDE media players combined.

Poor KDE - it can't have a great media player!!! :(
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Automatic resize!
by Hooded One on Saturday 27/Mar/2004, @11:23
Whoo! I've been waiting for this one! The file dialog improvements are nice as well. Thank you.
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Cache size
by Arjan van Leeuwen on Sunday 28/Mar/2004, @11:41
Is is possible to enlarge the cache or buffer size of Kaffeine, so that I can watch trailers on www.apple.com/trailers without waiting for them to load every 3 seconds?
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Kaffeine Rocks
by David on Monday 29/Mar/2004, @05:43
Well, I don't know what other people have been smoking but Kaffeine is very, very good. KMPlayer is good, but Kaffeine has a much better interface and I have been able to play every video file known to man. As far as I have been able to tell, and I've been using them a while, Xine and MPlayer are fairly equal. Perhaps Xine was behind on playing certain video types, but it has caught up well and it handles DVD menus much better. As a video player, Kaffeine really is a swiss army knife.

Nice one Giorgos!

I suspect that people have been compiling it wrong, or with bad optimisations, not installing the Xine libraries properly or there are some bad things going on with their distribution.
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