VLC Media Player 0.8.4 is out

mctk writes "This new release features many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages... Have a look here for the full list of changes. Binary packages and the source code are available on the VLC download page." Always been one of my favorites on any platform.

Comments

Mac OS X wizard?

[pomo monster]

I'll reserve judgment 'til I've used it a bit more, but nine times out of ten, wizards are a usability disaster that are only marginally better than the abomination of an interface that necessitated them to begin with. (Those nine times are usually in Microsoft products.) You shouldn't need a wizard to set things up, or to create things--the options should be right there in front of you, and not require elaborate explanation. Wizards are kind of alien to the whole OS X experience, even though there are a few examples of decent, helpful wizards in the OS.

Also, I notice the new VLC still doesn't have a nice way to compensate for audio desynchronization. There should be a slider or something on the controller to scrub the audio sync back and forth in realtime. Add to that the totally awkward menu to select where to play fullscreen--why not just play it on whatever display the window's in right now?--and overall I'm disappointed in this update.

That said, it's still the best "free" player out there for OS X I've seen yet. Congratulations to the developers. It could be a great product, if only they'd pay a little more attention to usability and elegance.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[pomo monster]

It's a personal preference, I'm sure, but MPlayer makes VLC look like the fucking Chrysler building in terms of design. All things considered, VLC's not too bad--it's just that it could be much better, without (seemingly) much effort.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[Blakey Rat]

Are you joking?

The GUI to mplayer on OS X is SO BAD it took me over a half hour to figure out how to quit the program. You click the movie window to bring it to the front, hit Command-Q, nothing happens. That's weird. You scrub the menus. No Quit option. Hmm. Let's try making the window bigger... Command-0, nothing. Command-1, nothing. (In pretty much every media player, Command-1 is half-size, Command-2 is normal-size, Command-3 is double-size, and Command-0 is full-screen. VLC is a bit different, but not so much that it's too confusing.)

Of course since I don't keep my Dock open all the time, little did I know that mplayer isn't ONE program, it's TWO programs... and the program that actually plays the movie doesn't quit. At all. It can't quit. But if you quit the *other* program, then it automatically goes away. I guess the "designer" of the GUI didn't know you could hide the Dock. Of course, even if he didn't, there's no excuse for putting two icons on it, one of which doesn't (for all practical purposes) work when you could use one in the first place.

Whoever "designed" this interface obviously had never used a Mac before or, possibly, even a GUI before. It's terrible. It's horrible. It violates almost every rule of good GUI design, and, as a result, it's a pain in the ass to use. I'm sorry. It's an F in my book.

VLC might not have all the codecs or whatever, that mplayer has, but you know what? It has a GUI that wasn't designed by an alien from the planet Weebo who's never seen a computer before, so it gets my download every time.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[pomo monster]

Nah, there's no such thing as "no design," only thoughtless design.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[pomo monster]

Or, to reply to myself, "unintelligent design" if you prefer.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[pomo monster]

I'm contributing by making suggestions, right here, right now. Not everybody can (or even wants to) learn to program. So don't be a jackass--it just makes the open source community look bad.

Re:Mac OS X wizard?

[zootm]

No, I think the point was that in FOSS land you don't bash an app if it has different key bindings than some of your usual native os apps.

Why not? It's a valid criticism. Consistency is a large part of usability, and usability is what GUIs are there for.

It's fair enough if it's ported from another platform and has taken the keybindings with it, that does not change the fact that its interface is crappy on the new one. The fact that a system is OSS does not remove one's right to talk about its flaws.

Not everyone is capable of coding, but most people can tell when something doesn't work they way they want it to. The problem is that those who are capable of coding are often a lot more tolerant of weirdness and having to learn new interfaces, even when it's completely unnecessary, so the feedback of those who can't code is often invaluable.

Wake me when it plays WMV3 on the Mac

[Nova Express]

That, to my mind, is the huge, gaping hole in VLC. And the latest version doesn't solve the problem, as WMV3 isn't supported on any now-Windows platform. I would think that somebody would have reversed engineered the codec by now. It's hard to be the Swiss Army CanOpener of video formats when it doesn't open half of all the cans coming off the line...

Re:Once again, beaten by DIGG!

[Anonymous Coward]

The world cares, deeply.

As in who gives a shit? Digg sucks ass.

Re:vlc - I like

[chris_eineke]

mplayer does that just fine, thank you.

Re:Just stop using WMV3

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate that codec. It's not like MPEG4 derivatives are multi-platform, why do people still insist on using WMV?

Re:Ignores DVD Region Code

[Zhe Mappel]

Quicktime gives me nag entries in the menus -- like, I pay a four-digit sum for a computer and they won't throw in the $40 fee for the full fuctionality? Really clever, Jobs Agreed. Apple's cheapness on this issue is sad; nickle and diming your customers is especially silly when the system ships with extraneous iApps. Look, Apple, I'll trade you my useless iMovie just so Quicktime can do what *free* players everywhere do.

Re:Once again, beaten by DIGG!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, the only people who ever talk about Digg are loudmouth wanker fanboys, making Digg much like Gentoo; while it may be "teh new hotness", I wouldn't fucking touch that shit with a twenty foot barge poll. I wouldn't want to associate myself with that sort of fucking idiot.

Ironically, so much better on Windows...

[cardpuncher]

VLC manages to embody the essential dichotomy of the OSS vs Proprietary Software debate.

Get an installer for Windows or the Mac and you get a useful multi-purpose tool that has more flexibility and fewer restrictions than the equivalent commercial software.

Try to install it on Linux and you realise the advantages of a commercial platform onto which you simply install binary application packages. There are *some* packages available for VLC, provided you happen to have the right version of the right Linux distribution, but most have some important features configured out. Try to compile it yourself and get ready for a nightmare of dependencies on specific (sometimes elderly) versions of obscure libraries, header files that your Linux distribution didn't think to provide and a number of other little glitches that have you tearing your hair out. Or, more likely, giving up.

Now if only there were an open platform onto which you could simply copy an open application and just have it run...

Re:vlc - I like

[6*7]

But this results in a 1 pass encoding, anyone that likes some quality would prefer to just dump the stream to disc and spend the extra time for a multipass encode.