Xine Now Supports VA-API, GL 2.0 Output, EAC3

A new version of xine-lib was released today, which is the library that powers the Xine multimedia playback engine. The xine-lib 1.2.3 release brings numerous features including VA-API hardware video decoding and support for OpenGL 2.0 output.

It's been nearly one year since the last xine-lib release (v1.2.2 happened on 9 June 2012), but now there is xine-lib 1.2.3 with several prominent changes.

Some of the wortwhile improvements to xine-lib 1.2.3 include:

- Intel VA-API hardware decoding support. For the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver and other GPU drivers that support the Video Acceleration API, it's now possible with Xine to offload the video decoding process to the graphics processor rather than the CPU. Xine-lib has already supported VDPAU for video decoding on other drivers/hardware.

- There's now an OpenGL 2.0 output plug-in.

- Cropping support for the X Shared Memory (XShm) output plug-in. The XShm, Xv, and OpenGL output plug-ins also have color matrix and full-range support.

- A fast libjpeg-based JPEG decoder has been introduced.

- EAC3 (Enhanced AC-3 / Dolby Digital Plus) digital audio compression is now supported in conjunction with FFmpeg.

- Various fixes and large PAT support for MPEG-TS.

Xine-lib 1.2.3 can be downloaded from Xine-Project.org.