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?

[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.

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...