i've decided to rewrite xiron from scratch in favor of a new and much simpler architecture. the former design was rather complex and attempted to reimplement many things already present in modern scripting languages (like dynamically loading extension modules). the new xiron has now a thin layer which interfaces xine to ruby and many higher level functions are implemented in ruby itself. this is very efficient since ruby has a powerful standard library and most other parts needed to build media players (like gtk) are already available as extensions. so stay tuned for the next xiron release "pure energy". :-)