 XMMS's default appearance The X Multimedia System (XMMS) is a free multimedia player, very similar to Winamp, that runs on many Unix-like operating systems (including Linux). It supports skins that were made for Winamp. It was first released under the name X11Amp, with a license that did not provide any access to the program's source code. Nowadays, it is released under the GNU General Public License.
XMMS currently supports the following audio and video file formats:
- Audio CD, including CDDB lookup.
- libmikmod supported formats (including .XM, .MOD, .IT)
- MPEG Layer 1,2 and 3 (Also known as MP3), using the mpg123 library
- Ogg-Vorbis
- WAV
- speex high quality & ratio speech compression format via plugin.
- FLAC support is provided by a plugin in the FLAC library
It supports Icecast and Shoutcast streaming, and is compatible with Winamp 2 skins.
Criticism
XMMS has continued to use an antiquated version of the GTK+ toolkit years after a major revision was available. The primary reason for this reluctance to upgrade was the fact that many XMMS plugins (written by third parties) were dependent on the older version of GTK to function properly (about boxes and configuration dialogs). Many software developers also consider the XMMS codebase to be poorly designed and difficult to maintain. These factors led to various forks and related projects:
- The Beep Media Player, a fork of XMMS code that uses GTK+ 2, started around 2003
- A lesser known project named XMMS2 (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/xmms2/), which also forks the XMMS code to use GTK+ 2. (currently seems abandoned)
- The official XMMS2 project, which is a complete re-design of the music player, started around the end of 2002.
See also: Comparison of media players
External links
|
