no sound when playing WMV files

[Ziyad A. M. alBatly]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 03:37 +0100, Magellan wrote:
> This worked great for me.  Thanks.
> Can someone tell me what this does?  I'd like to understand why this
> works.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Magellan
> 
Xine (which powers Totem) can use one of several methods to
"understand" (or more technically: decode) audio streams in media files.

The main 2 methods are: "FFMPEG" and "Win32" DLLs.  (xanim' *.xa files
and native closed source *.so files (supplied by RealNetworks and DivX
Networks) are other methods.)

FFMPEG is a Free Software (library) released under the term of the GNU
LGPL.  It's native (in that I mean: it compiles and run on your Platform
and Operating System natively without translation or "hooks").  It's
very very very fast compared to all other methods.  And last, but not
least, it support a lot of media stream types.

Win32 DLLs is using a "Win32 Dynamic Link Library" loader (borrowed from
"AVIFILE" which is, in turn, borrowed from the WinE project) to fake a
Windows environment so that those files will function to some degree.
The application (Xine in this example) would load the *.dll, *.ax,
*.acm, *.vwp, and/or *.qtx file(s) and feed them the stream to decode
it.  Those file are *NOT* Free Software or Open Source (or, at least,
most of them).

As Xine is an Open Source project, it prefer the FFMPEG libraries to the
Win32 DLL method for a lot of reasons.  That's why it defaults to decode
any media type using FFMPEG if it supports it and fall back to the other
methods otherwise.  The FFMPEG library used in the Xine version shipped
with Ubuntu is rather old and it had some bugs regarding decoding some
WMA1, WMA2 (used a lot in *.asf, *.wma, and *.wmv files), and QD2 (used
in some *.mov files) streams.

FFMPEG fixed this bugs a long time ago, but it's only available in the
bleeding edge version polled from the SVN directly.  Since they didn't
release a "stable" version containing these fixes Ubuntu (and probably
other vendors) can't just use the bleeding edge version as it's not
doomed stable enough.

This "trick" instruct (or more acuretlly: *force*) Xine to use the Win32
DLL to decode audio stream when possible and fallback to FFMPEG
otherwise.

That's all.  I hope I was clear, and I'm very sorry for this long
message.

Ziyad.