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Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
Fans of the walled garden may be happy with what they get, while those who are unhappy with that choice may be looking elsewhere for their OS environment, thus VLC for Mac may not be on their radar.
I remember when I had a Mac about 2 years ago it was very hard to find something that would burn CD's (yes I know VLC won't do this), play tunes and videos because the developers of all the alternative programs just gave up in the face of the mighty iTunes when that started to gain popularity.
And I hate, hate, hated iTunes, the interface, the then DRMified music store, the way it tried to force you to use a 'library' to store every single song that I only wanted to play once - it was and still is one of those programs like MPLAB [IDE for writing software for PIC] that just for some reason makes me want to dig my way to China with a teaspoon because that would be less stressful than using it.
Its like its authors decided the age-old concept of 'files' was not good enough anymore so their software (poorly) tries to portray the real-life concept of a dusty box filled with records while dumping every song into some random folder with a cryptic filename. But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.
Having VLC go from the Mac would mean there is only one real alternative left - mplayer. Now mplayer is a fine piece of software but it's good to have VLC just in case, they both have their own distinct advantages.