Media can be opened in many different ways. For one, typing xtheater followed
by the location will cause xtheater to attempt to open that location.
If you do not specify a location, you will be presented with this window:
Open a file either by selecting the appropriate option from the Media menu
or press the "eject" button for a file open dialog. Also, if you are running
an application that manages files with drag and drop, you can drag an icon from
a window of that application to the control window of Xtheater pictured above.
Applications where this has been tested and known to work include:
Konqueror - The KDE Browser/File Manager
GMC - A standard Gnome file manager
Nautilus - The standard Gnome filemanager as of Gnome 1.4
DFM - lightwieght desktop file manager
ROX - Acorn look-alike file manager.
EFM - A now defunct file manager from the makers of enlightenment.
Netscape - Everyone knows what netscape is.
And file managers that do not work:
FLFM - A Pathname that is too strange is presented, could be compensated
for, but would break all other drag and drop except flfm.
Endeavor - Does not seem to do standard drag and drop
Mozilla - Can get path name, but in incomprehensible format.
Others may also work, Mozilla and Galeon have been tested as not working with
Xtheater with the Mozilla 0.8.1 release, but as with many things in Mozilla,
this is very likely to change. The drop from a Mozilla window in 0.8.1
is in a completely useless format, in my opinion, and parsing it into something
useful is a non-trivial task.
After opening a file, the control window will reconfigure itself to show
all options relevant to the file opened. If the media is MPG format, the
window looks like this:
The buttons do as you might expect, also, a playback window will pop up on
screen. This window can be resized and will scale to fit whatever you resize
it to, taking advantage of hardware scaling and interpolation when available.
To open a new file, just repeat the process and a the current file will
automatically close before opening the new clip. You can exit the program
and close current media without an exit from the Media menu.
General operation is straightforward. Advanced operation for MPG/VCD playback
is provided in next section, followed by AVI/ASF details.