Visualization

Note

Visualization support was a Google Summer Of Code project of 2007 (see here). The code produced is not yet part of the mainline distribution.

This page only gives an overview of the current state and wants to tease what can be expected in this, or a slightly altered form for one of the future releases of XMMS2. Furthermore, interested developers are given the necessary information to try it out.

Visualization for the user

Teaser

There's a screencast showing several visualization clients available here (39 MiB). It is encoded with Ogg Theora+Vorbis. Focus on the gnome panel applet with the flames :)

Overview

XMMS2 handles visualization quite a little bit different than most other music players. There are no visualization "plugins", as to the nature of XMMS2's client-server concept, visualization can be done in a standalone application, just like editing the playlist or searching media.

To utilize visualization, you can just install the client of your interest and run it besides XMMS2.

Availability

There will be several solutions to have visualization of your music with XMMS2:

Using a standalone client called "xmms2-libvisual", all available such called "actor plugins" for libvisual are supported. These are the same as for example supported by Amarok. In particular, projectM is supported.
XMMS-Rootvis will be available for XMMS2, too.
Some already available clients to control XMMS2 will feature "inbuilt" visualization inside the main window

Don't expect plugins for good ol' XMMS to work with XMMS2. But if you're interested in a particular one, you could ask us to port it over.

Visualization over network

We adhere to the network transparent client-server concept of XMMS2, therefore, visualization is also available to clients connecting from other hosts! It stays in sync with the music regardless of considerable lag, for example on a wireless connection.

Visualization for the developer

Getting it to work

Today, you need to fetch the "xmms2-ypnos" tree of XMMS2 to build it with visualization support. You can do that using git or download directly.

Build and install XMMS2 as usual, and if it worked, add "visualization" to the effects chain in your XMMS2 configuration. Example:

` ``equalizer` ` ``visualization` ` ` ` ` Run "vistest" or "xmms2-libvisual" to test if visualization works properly. You could also try "xmms2-ripper", which dumps the audio currently played as ogg/vorbis stream to stdout.