Forgive me for being an anti-C++ bigot

No, sorry - I won't forgive you :-)

, but if Xine has an independent implementation of rtsp that works better

The only part of Xine's implementation that 'works better' is its implementation of RealNetworks' proprietary modifications to RTSP/RTP. But it turns out that that's all it does - it's a very limited implementation of RTSP/RTP that works only for streaming RealAudio/RealVideo. It doesn't support streaming from arbitrary (standards-compliant) RTSP servers, nor does it support RTP streams for codecs other than RealAudio/RealVideo. In particular, it doesn't support MPEG-1 or 2 audio or video, H.263+ video, motion-JPEG video, MPEG-4 ES video, PCM (u-law and a-law) audio, GSM audio, QCELP audio, MPEG-4 LATM audio (3GPP-standard), MPEG-4 Generic audio/video, or QuickTime Generic audio/video RTP streams, all of which are working (or are close to working) in the existing implementation. Ross.