New Release of Kaffeine Media Player

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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Comments

by MooGooFooBar (not verified)

http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/pics/subtitles2.png
Good job kaffeine developers!

"Hi, let me show you our leet free software and and by the way, we also openly pirate movies that have not yet been released on DVD."

by Jürgen (not verified)

Ok, you convinced me! Kaffeine is an illegal, evil program. Just for information: The screenshot was'nt made on my machine and it was'nt aimed to glorify file sharing. Anyway, i removed it, i hope you can sleep better now...

by macewan (not verified)

Upgraded kaff* this morning. Works like a charm with embedded quicktime in konqueror.

:)

this is SuSE 9 Pro with KDE 3.2.1

???? ????? ?? ??? ??, KDE ?? ??? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ??? ??????, ??????, ??? ????? ?? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ???? (???) ???? ????

KDE ?? ?? universal media player ?? ???????? ??? ???? ??? ????? ???

by rizwaan (not verified)

Just above i posted a comment in Hindi, but it is not visible in konqueror. I was able to type the text in hindi (using mangal (hindi unicode) font). and Devnagari keyboard layout.

by rizwaan (not verified)

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!!! :(

by rizwaan (not verified)

Just downloaded Kaffeine (slackware packages) from
http://www3.linuxpackages.net/packages/Slackware-9.1/pcxz/

And I hope Kaffeine will be the media player of KDE 3.3 :)

by Giorgos Gousios (not verified)

Hmmm "Windows Media Player 9". Just try to install it by default (no other plugins-codecs). What types of files can you play? MP3, AVI (only the MS-oriented codecs), MPEG and possibly some others not worth mentioning at all (eg WMA-WMV). No AAC, no FLAC, no DVD's, no OGG, no Real, no Quicktime, no Divx, no... A default installation of kaffeine+xine+w32codecs packages can not only play all of the above but also has features like subitle support, A/V streaming, filters and possibly more. The installation is hardly more difficult with RPMs or apt-get. Playing is at least as easy as in windows (DnD, playlists, click and play).

Did you ever care to try this combination or you just read a multimedia-in-linux-is-bad column somewhere and wanted say something about it? Com' on mate, you didn't write a single word about kaffeine on a posting list supposed to comment on its release!

>Can't you all not-so-good programmers (if you were all good then, a good >media player would be in existence)
Perhaps you, oh mighty programmer, could help us mere mortals write one!

by kplayer-user (not verified)

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

Did you try KPlayer?

by Nephestofolis (not verified)

Yes! There are no good media players to Linux, yet!
This is one of my frustrations, as a new Linux user.

I am searching to a good player. The great problem is that people in the developers comunity are more interested in create beautiful skins, full of unuseful options, and a lot of unuseful things. They think that it is the most important, when as really, the only thing really important is that things works!

I have never seen multimedia things that works good in Linux. Maybe people in this comunities have not evolued yet.

In the other hands, network, security, process, I know the Linux is good. But for now, its all I believe.

All the multimedia tecnologi for Linux is an obscure world. Maybe, by this, there are not so good games like in Windows! In the day that it occurs, Computing world will have a great revolution. Perhaps Microsoft will be making money by services, or another thing like this. I hope!

Thanks.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

Actually mplayer is such a fine program that I know several people that use it on Windows instead of the usual player there.

by KDE User (not verified)

The usual player there is ironically called "mplayer.exe".

by duger (not verified)

I thought it's "wmplayer.exe".......

by Hooded One (not verified)

Whoo! I've been waiting for this one! The file dialog improvements are nice as well. Thank you.

by Arjan van Leeuwen (not verified)

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?

by Juergen Kofler (not verified)

Increase video buffer size: xine Engine Parameters|video|num_buffers - set it to 1000 or higher.

by macewan (not verified)

I second that request

by David (not verified)

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.