Requirements
The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded at
Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3_passthrough) output
The cable used for the SBLive can easily be self-made or buy a stereo 3.5mm jack to dual RCA cable.
xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback, especially with DVDs

        cat stream.mpg | gxine stdin://
+>        cat stream.mpg | gxine stdin:/

How can I watch files with external AVI subtitles?

This is not supported in current xine 1.0.x releases (but it is being - actively worked on, so please be patient :) ). In xine 0.9.13 - this used to be: +> In xine 0.9.13 this used to be:

Latest xine-lib modules (1-beta3 or newer) support external subtitles + for any media file, not only AVI. In order to use it you can pass an + special MRL construction like: + +
xine test.mpg#subtitle:file.sub +
+ + The external subtitles support can also be used by any xine + frontend. Currently, just xine-ui implements this feature with a + subtitle selection dialog (press control+shift+s to see it). +

Requirements

The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded at
Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3_passthrough) output

The cable used for the SBLive can easily be self-made or buy a stereo 3.5mm jack to dual RCA cable.

Might be a soundcard problem, if it only comes in longer intervals. Your soundcard does not keep it's sampling frequency accurately enough, which results in audio and video - getting out of sync and xine has to compensate. - Maybe switching to different drivers (alsa to oss or vise-versa) - can help here. + getting out of sync and xine has to compensate. If you see the message + only from time to time, you might remedy it by using the resampling sync + method. You can do this by setting the configuration entry + audio.av_sync_method to resample. +

If you receive the metronom message more often, + maybe switching to different drivers (alsa to oss or vise-versa) + can help here. It has also been reported that setting the configuration + entry audio.force_rate to the native sampling + rate of your soundcard (try 44100 and 48000) helps sometimes.

Another, whole different possibility is that you have some background @@ -2692,6 +2740,59 @@ NAME="STUTTERING" nothing to worry about.

xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback, especially with DVDs

You are using the OSS audio output plugin, right? In order to keep video and audio + in sync, xine regularly queries the audio driver for the amount of delay induced by + the current length of the driver's audio buffer. Unfortunately some OSS drivers seem + to be broken because the can return strange values here. This confuses the xine audio + subsystem and makes it drop audio. +

You should try the various settings of the + configuration entry audio.oss_sync_method. The options + getodelay and getoptr ask the driver and + might therefore show the problem. But chances are that only one is broken and the other + works, so you should try them both first, since they are the most accurate. + The option probebuffer does not ask the driver directly but + tries to determine the buffer length from outside. This should work with any driver + and is the way to go, of the driver dependent methods fail. + softsync is the least accurate and should be used only in + emergency situations. +

Requirements

The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded at Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3_passthrough) output

Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3_passthrough) output

The cable used for the SBLive can easily be self-made or buy a stereo 3.5mm jack to dual RCA cable.

xine seems to lose sound arbitrarily during playback, especially with DVDs

The OSS driver is maintained by creative and can be downloaded at
Setting up xine for SPDIF (AC3_passthrough) output