Seeing this story elsewhere today prompted me to check the Android Market for a similar app.
Yup, found one and downloaded it immediately.
Works with Transmission (like the rejected app in the story) and uTorrent, making it great for users of any platform (i think mac users have one or the other, and Transmission is great on linux, uTorrent rocks on windows).
Gotta setup my new computer with DYNDNS again, but It looks like a nice app just from the setup options.
I have started developing a bit (a tiny bit) for Android, and I am really starting to appreciate the platform a lot.
I switched from windows mobile to the iphone a year ago, and then from the iphone to a G1 a few months ago, and I love my G1, it's the best phone I've ever had, and knowing now that I can develop apps for it easily (and on any platform, no less) for free (if I don't want to distribute them, or for just $25 one time developer's fee if I do) makes me REALLY like the platform.
On the one hand, it will never again be as easy to learn as it is now. The older you get and the more time passes between having been in school and then doing it again, the harder it will be. Not only to find the motivation (unless you really do like school), but also to get your brain into learning mode again.
Well there's your problem--you're not supposed to stop learning just because you stopped going to school.;)...
I agree. I actually dropped out of college for Mechanical Engineering after 4 years (still had general ed to do) to work full time at the company I'd been working part time at.
I've been here 3 years now and have learned so much more than I was learning in school. I've taught myself Solidworks and MasterCAM for CAD and machining, and now run our machine shop with 3 CNCs. I also taught myself C# programming and have been writing some applications for us. I've recently even been learning how to write apps for Android, just for shits. I also taught myself PCB layout and have already made 1 PCB that we've been using in some prototypes.
My buddy was on the same course as me (well, except he graduated, and on time no less) and he is getting his masters in Mechatronics. He's learning some interesting stuff but I can't say he's better off than me. I have huge amounts of practical experience, and I make more than him (by a bit), even though he got hired full time at a major company, and I work at a small place.
I also like practical stuff more than really high level analysis, so this course is better for me. -Taylor
You don't realize that people don't want this crap.
perhaps - just perhaps - they never planned on it 'going big-time' and its just a way to make a paycheck (I already said this in another post and I'm curious if its how the employees are viewing this or not).
my guess is that its 'just a job' and perhaps only a very few 'believe' in this 'rent my own discs back to myself thru a 3rd party' nonsense.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I think some people don't think too hard about this - marketing says people will love it, so they don't really stop to think if that's true. I know a lot of engineers that just find "some job" do what they're told, and don't think too much.
As a Lala employee, I recommend you try the site out. Michael Robertson likes to mischaracterize our product because his competing product isn't doing too well. This network DRM thing is what it is, but basically it means that we don't make it easy to just download the mp3 that gets streamed. If it weren't called DRM you wouldn't thing of it that way. You'd probably just think of it as trying to prevent leechers. We sell mp3s, and those are just plain mp3s, nothing special, no DRM. It's just the streaming part of it where we put in some safeguards. We know (and the labels, too) that people who don't want to pay for music won't pay. But it's a snap to build a tool that will let you grab any stream. The point, again, is to make it annoying enough to try to grab the stream that it isn't worth trying to get it from us.
According to the article, which claims to be quoting word for word from the patent article:
Q: So how is Network DRM better? A: By delivering the product directly from the network, only authorized users and devices can access the media. Access by users and devices is controlled on the web and can be constantly adapted to changing technologies and market pressures.
So, someone else gets to decide how i listen to my music, and if a new kind of device comes out, I have to wait until that person decides (if ever) that my device is acceptable... Like when i had a windows mobile phone and I wanted to watch my episodes of the Daily Show that i had legally purchased from iTunes, and couldn't...
Q: How is Network DRM good for the content owners? A: Access to the digital media is controlled by the Digital Rights Management (DRM) process. The DRM process is invoked any time that a user interacts with the managed digital media. The DRM process is capable of computing the permissible uses in real-time, proving real-time control over the assets.
And even though I will have *paid* for my media, someone else can revoke my right to keep listening to it...
Q: In my article I warned people that with Lala they cannot download their tracks meaning, ultimately, the record labels are in control of their media. Is that accurate? A: The web restricted nature of the offering means that the digital assets are at all times controlled by the system (versus digital files downloaded to users) and thus result in minimal piracy.
..And when your company goes defunct in 5 years and your servers go down, my entire collection is lost, just like all the people that paid for music from Yahoo's DRM'd service, MSN's DRM'd service, etc.
Whereas if I have what amounts to $15 in flash memory in a device, I can listen to a good chunk (or as prices drop, all) of my music collection, without fear of it disappearing, servers going away, network connectivity failing, or a new device not being supported... IF i stay with MP3's.
You don't realize that people don't want this crap. This is like masturbation for the recording industries so they love your product, but people will hate this. Everyone got screwed when the DRM servers at yahoo and MSN went offline and you're just setting people up for that again. My music collection is secure in my hands and when I'm 50 years old and I want to listen to some "classics", I know that I will have them in hand and safe. I won't have lost them to some server years prior. -Taylor
By god man, you're a genius! If they just stop releasing music, no one will be able to hear it, and no one will be able to copy it!
You're going to make millions!
Also, it's too bad they aren't more worried about people stealing their ideas... if they were they could follow my advice above and stop having ideas! We'd all be better off... -Taylor
The exception, which appears in this situation, is when you are chosen as a target due to a high payoff (military). In this case, simply being harder than your neighbour is NOT going to help you.
So, what you're saying is, we need to let our economy keep tanking until people would rather hack into Canada? -Taylor
Yeah, I have those. I keep it next to my hydrogen grade garden hose, and my lava grade plumbing.
Holy crap! I have been looking *ALL OVER* for lava grade plumbing! I thought the volcano store would have that, but I kept getting some line about "No, we don't handle lava grade plumbing. Plutonium grade, sure, we pipe that all day long, but for lava grade you'd have to go mail order."
I swear that guy didn't know his Francium from an aloe vera plant, and TRUST ME, once you make that mistake, you never forget.
As it is I had a pinch job so i tried to cheap out and use Plutonium grade plumbing for my lava piping and -let me tell you- it's not worth it. I've got foaming all over the place and half the pipes just got up and walked away. I spent half my day talking to the police and the other half tracking down a veterinarian. Before long all the pipes were all yellow and grey and my connectors turned to cabbage.
Well, I'd more care to use the real apostrophe, real quotes, the ellipsis character, list point, wide dash, Euro symbol, mathematical symbols, write foreign names and many other useful characters, that are on my keyboard.:)
Instead I am forced to use really stupid replacements.
Foreign names, who the hell cares about foreign names!?;)
Being saying since the Pentium II days. This "always-be-upgrading-the-latest-spec" is fine for hardcore users, but for everybody else, "good enough" happened quite a few hardware generations ago. The sad part is that we're only now having this conversation.
Eh, it seems different now - companies don't just have a range of products ranging from slow to fast, they actually champion some of their slower products (netbooks). Even power users are buying a netbook for on the go use, because they are mostly good enough. Sure, we have big fast desktops, but this is the first time even power users are buying low powered machines. -Taylor
As a roboticist, I think this is the coolest thing since rocket skates. I can't wait for this to be commercialised.
Real roboticists don't start sentences with "As a roboticist", and if you were a roboticist, you wouldn't care if it was commericialized, you'd just build one. Those robots are not complicated as far as robots go. -Taylor
What's wrong with "data rate" and "bandwidth" as different words for different things?
If this is how language evolves, I predict that in a few hundred years we will only use one word for everything, and its meaning must be inferred from the context.
Given the historical evolution of language, that would be a very silly prediction. Plenty of words have two meanings without things spiraling out of control. Or are you not familiar with reason?
If they're charging a max of $75 for the overages, whats to stop someone from using the $29.95 plan, and maxing the fee...effectively getting an unlimited plan for $104.95 (plus obligatory taxes of course)
That's what I was thinking.
Though a better idea is that if they're charging that much - fuck 'em! I live in the Bay Area and we have a nice ISP here called speakeasy.net, which I am not affiliated with, that looks pretty cool, and I've been meaning to try them out if ATT Uverse decides to fuck me like that. Speakeasy is more business class than anything, so they are a little pricey, but if Time Warner is gonna charge that much, speakeasy might actually be cheaper!
(I picked up a nasty pedantic habit in college from a professor, so sorry I just have to throw this in:)
Bandwidth is the capacity of a communications channel and is measured in Hz and Mhz. kbit/s and Mbit/s are data rates, not bandwidth.
Actually, you're wrong to make that correction.
Your definition is correct, and historically your definition was more common, but bandwidth now has two definitions:
1. The numerical difference between the upper and lower frequencies of a band of electromagnetic radiation, especially an assigned range of radio frequencies.
2. The amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time.
So when being pedantic, do it right at least.
Also note that, as people have said, bandwidth is still being used incorrectly in the article, because they can't possibly supply unlimited bandwidth, but not for the reason you state. -Taylor
Fail. Let me google that for you is only funny when its something stupidly obvious to google for. How the hell was the guy supposed to already know to google "handbrake"? -Taylor
For short-range seeking, the shortcut keys are easier than trying to use the seek bar anyway.
Again, only true if it is convenient to have a keyboard out, and in my living room, this is not true. Even for web browsing i mostly stick to favorites on that computer and don't really ever need the keyboard. -Taylor
...In Minnesota there isn't a season on feral cat nor are they a protected species so you are free to dispatch them.
Poor kitties! I know feral cats are a big problem but that's still sad. In January my GF and i just bought two kittens that has been rescued from the wild. They are brothers and were only 4 months old when found. They are just about the cutest things i have ever seen and really light up our lives, we really love them.
The woman who found them is really cool, she basically traps ferrel cats, has them fixed, and then lets them out if they are old, or finds homes if they are young. They get to live their lives, but they don't make any more cats. Great deal. -Taylor
Note my use of the word "effectively". I said it has effectively no impact. I'm very careful with my words. Read the article i linked to, windows seem even worse than housecats, with over 100 million birds.
As someone said below, double x = zero for very small values of x. This is a mathematical fact, to a certain precision. -Taylor
Just to cut off this dead birds argument before it starts... I know a guy that runs some wind farms in Cali here (the livermore ones) and as a test they decided to shut off one half of their farm for a month and see the difference in birds killed.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
You know what kills WAY more birds than that per year? Housecats. Example quote from some government study in the UK:
"In 1990, researchers estimated that "outdoor" house cats and feral cats were responsible for killing nearly 78 million small mammals and birds annually in the United Kingdom."
Awesome, thanks for the tip! I'll have to check it out, I did like the UI stuff I saw in XBMC. I also recently renamed and organized all my files so they don't have the crazy filenames from the original torrents - it's very nice. It's still too bad they can't make something like that simpler, but I'll try your suggestion. -Taylor
left : Short time skip backward (10sec by default) right : Short time skip forward (10sec by default) left-up : Faster right-up : Slower left-down : Go to previous entry in playlist right-down : Go to next entry in playlist left-right : Play/Pause right-left : Play/Pause up : Volume up down : Volume down up-down : Mute Volume down-up : Mute Volume up-right : Change Audio track down-right : Change Subtitle track up-left : Enter fullscreen mode down-left : Quit VLC
Hmm... They do ALL that and they can't add "Single click: Play/pause"? Lame. I mean, obviously not everyone cares but it works REALLY well being able to click to pause in MPC. Gestures? Gestures are like the red-headed stepchild of interface methods - they are weird and people don't like them. Meanwhile, *clicking* the mouse, the thing it was designed to do, does nothing. I find this highly irritating.
And even if there is some way to force it, or make it work, or open some config file and change a line, why the hell isn't it standard!? It works well and fits right in where there is currently NO interface feature. It seems dead obvious to me and its simple things like that that make me question a project. Forget about pausing, who uses VLC and doesn't wish the trackbar expanded when you went full screen? I have a nice 1920x1080 TV and the trackbar is only like 600px wide. WTF? Try scrolling back 60 seconds in the godfather on a 600px wide trackbar 'cause your friend distracted you on a good part. That's damn tough, 60 seconds is only 3 pixels! if it were 1920 wide it would be 10px - tough but 3 times easier! I mean if this were a beta that would be fine but VLC has been around forever! I know they're still not at v1.0 but gmail is still in beta, so that's not always in indicator.
And the fact that it's more processor intensive than MPC? How many people are working on VLC that they can't even match MPC? MPC even streams better over a LAN at my place, which is funny because VIDEO LAN CLIENT should be better! -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing this story elsewhere today prompted me to check the Android Market for a similar app.
Yup, found one and downloaded it immediately.
Works with Transmission (like the rejected app in the story) and uTorrent, making it great for users of any platform (i think mac users have one or the other, and Transmission is great on linux, uTorrent rocks on windows).
Gotta setup my new computer with DYNDNS again, but It looks like a nice app just from the setup options.
I have started developing a bit (a tiny bit) for Android, and I am really starting to appreciate the platform a lot.
I switched from windows mobile to the iphone a year ago, and then from the iphone to a G1 a few months ago, and I love my G1, it's the best phone I've ever had, and knowing now that I can develop apps for it easily (and on any platform, no less) for free (if I don't want to distribute them, or for just $25 one time developer's fee if I do) makes me REALLY like the platform.
Android rocks.
-Taylor
On the one hand, it will never again be as easy to learn as it is now. The older you get and the more time passes between having been in school and then doing it again, the harder it will be. Not only to find the motivation (unless you really do like school), but also to get your brain into learning mode again.
Well there's your problem--you're not supposed to stop learning just because you stopped going to school. ;)...
I agree. I actually dropped out of college for Mechanical Engineering after 4 years (still had general ed to do) to work full time at the company I'd been working part time at.
I've been here 3 years now and have learned so much more than I was learning in school. I've taught myself Solidworks and MasterCAM for CAD and machining, and now run our machine shop with 3 CNCs. I also taught myself C# programming and have been writing some applications for us. I've recently even been learning how to write apps for Android, just for shits. I also taught myself PCB layout and have already made 1 PCB that we've been using in some prototypes.
My buddy was on the same course as me (well, except he graduated, and on time no less) and he is getting his masters in Mechatronics. He's learning some interesting stuff but I can't say he's better off than me. I have huge amounts of practical experience, and I make more than him (by a bit), even though he got hired full time at a major company, and I work at a small place.
I also like practical stuff more than really high level analysis, so this course is better for me.
-Taylor
You don't realize that people don't want this crap.
perhaps - just perhaps - they never planned on it 'going big-time' and its just a way to make a paycheck (I already said this in another post and I'm curious if its how the employees are viewing this or not).
my guess is that its 'just a job' and perhaps only a very few 'believe' in this 'rent my own discs back to myself thru a 3rd party' nonsense.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I think some people don't think too hard about this - marketing says people will love it, so they don't really stop to think if that's true. I know a lot of engineers that just find "some job" do what they're told, and don't think too much.
I never liked those guys.
-Taylor
As a Lala employee, I recommend you try the site out. Michael Robertson likes to mischaracterize our product because his competing product isn't doing too well. This network DRM thing is what it is, but basically it means that we don't make it easy to just download the mp3 that gets streamed. If it weren't called DRM you wouldn't thing of it that way. You'd probably just think of it as trying to prevent leechers. We sell mp3s, and those are just plain mp3s, nothing special, no DRM. It's just the streaming part of it where we put in some safeguards. We know (and the labels, too) that people who don't want to pay for music won't pay. But it's a snap to build a tool that will let you grab any stream. The point, again, is to make it annoying enough to try to grab the stream that it isn't worth trying to get it from us.
According to the article, which claims to be quoting word for word from the patent article:
Q: So how is Network DRM better?
A: By delivering the product directly from the network, only authorized users and devices can access the media. Access by users and devices is controlled on the web and can be constantly adapted to changing technologies and market pressures.
So, someone else gets to decide how i listen to my music, and if a new kind of device comes out, I have to wait until that person decides (if ever) that my device is acceptable... Like when i had a windows mobile phone and I wanted to watch my episodes of the Daily Show that i had legally purchased from iTunes, and couldn't...
Q: How is Network DRM good for the content owners?
A: Access to the digital media is controlled by the Digital Rights Management (DRM) process. The DRM process is invoked any time that a user interacts with the managed digital media. The DRM process is capable of computing the permissible uses in real-time, proving real-time control over the assets.
And even though I will have *paid* for my media, someone else can revoke my right to keep listening to it...
Q: In my article I warned people that with Lala they cannot download their tracks meaning, ultimately, the record labels are in control of their media. Is that accurate?
A: The web restricted nature of the offering means that the digital assets are at all times controlled by the system (versus digital files downloaded to users) and thus result in minimal piracy.
..And when your company goes defunct in 5 years and your servers go down, my entire collection is lost, just like all the people that paid for music from Yahoo's DRM'd service, MSN's DRM'd service, etc.
Whereas if I have what amounts to $15 in flash memory in a device, I can listen to a good chunk (or as prices drop, all) of my music collection, without fear of it disappearing, servers going away, network connectivity failing, or a new device not being supported... IF i stay with MP3's.
You don't realize that people don't want this crap. This is like masturbation for the recording industries so they love your product, but people will hate this. Everyone got screwed when the DRM servers at yahoo and MSN went offline and you're just setting people up for that again. My music collection is secure in my hands and when I'm 50 years old and I want to listen to some "classics", I know that I will have them in hand and safe. I won't have lost them to some server years prior.
-Taylor
...you can record it. Case closed.
By god man, you're a genius! If they just stop releasing music, no one will be able to hear it, and no one will be able to copy it!
You're going to make millions!
Also, it's too bad they aren't more worried about people stealing their ideas... if they were they could follow my advice above and stop having ideas! We'd all be better off...
-Taylor
Wow, finally! I've been looking for a way to make my music listening situation drastically more cumbersome and painful!
Sounds like they finally listened to all those people that kept calling for more restrictive listening scenarios!
-Taylor
The exception, which appears in this situation, is when you are chosen as a target due to a high payoff (military). In this case, simply being harder than your neighbour is NOT going to help you.
So, what you're saying is, we need to let our economy keep tanking until people would rather hack into Canada?
-Taylor
The actual cannon is, I believe....
It's canon.
Lets not get carried away with fictional languages and worlds until we have a reasonable understanding of our own.
http://www.answers.com/topic/canon-fiction
-Taylor
audio grade Ethernet cables
Yeah, I have those. I keep it next to my hydrogen grade garden hose, and my lava grade plumbing.
Holy crap! I have been looking *ALL OVER* for lava grade plumbing! I thought the volcano store would have that, but I kept getting some line about "No, we don't handle lava grade plumbing. Plutonium grade, sure, we pipe that all day long, but for lava grade you'd have to go mail order."
I swear that guy didn't know his Francium from an aloe vera plant, and TRUST ME, once you make that mistake, you never forget.
As it is I had a pinch job so i tried to cheap out and use Plutonium grade plumbing for my lava piping and -let me tell you- it's not worth it. I've got foaming all over the place and half the pipes just got up and walked away. I spent half my day talking to the police and the other half tracking down a veterinarian. Before long all the pipes were all yellow and grey and my connectors turned to cabbage.
I've still got the smell on my hands.
-Taylor
Well, I'd more care to use the real apostrophe, real quotes, the ellipsis character, list point, wide dash, Euro symbol, mathematical symbols, write foreign names and many other useful characters, that are on my keyboard. :)
Instead I am forced to use really stupid replacements.
Foreign names, who the hell cares about foreign names!? ;)
Also, my keyboard has snowmen.
-Taylor
What's seven orders of magnitude between friends?...
That's what I always tell the ladies. I mean, 10 inches, 10 micro inches... same thing right? Right...?
-Taylor
Being saying since the Pentium II days. This "always-be-upgrading-the-latest-spec" is fine for hardcore users, but for everybody else, "good enough" happened quite a few hardware generations ago. The sad part is that we're only now having this conversation.
Eh, it seems different now - companies don't just have a range of products ranging from slow to fast, they actually champion some of their slower products (netbooks). Even power users are buying a netbook for on the go use, because they are mostly good enough. Sure, we have big fast desktops, but this is the first time even power users are buying low powered machines.
-Taylor
As a roboticist, I think this is the coolest thing since rocket skates. I can't wait for this to be commercialised.
Real roboticists don't start sentences with "As a roboticist", and if you were a roboticist, you wouldn't care if it was commericialized, you'd just build one. Those robots are not complicated as far as robots go.
-Taylor
What's wrong with "data rate" and "bandwidth" as different words for different things?
If this is how language evolves, I predict that in a few hundred years we will only use one word for everything, and its meaning must be inferred from the context.
Given the historical evolution of language, that would be a very silly prediction. Plenty of words have two meanings without things spiraling out of control. Or are you not familiar with reason?
Then again... Marklar?
-Taylor
If they're charging a max of $75 for the overages, whats to stop someone from using the $29.95 plan, and maxing the fee...effectively getting an unlimited plan for $104.95 (plus obligatory taxes of course)
That's what I was thinking.
Though a better idea is that if they're charging that much - fuck 'em! I live in the Bay Area and we have a nice ISP here called speakeasy.net, which I am not affiliated with, that looks pretty cool, and I've been meaning to try them out if ATT Uverse decides to fuck me like that. Speakeasy is more business class than anything, so they are a little pricey, but if Time Warner is gonna charge that much, speakeasy might actually be cheaper!
-Taylor
(I picked up a nasty pedantic habit in college from a professor, so sorry I just have to throw this in :)
Bandwidth is the capacity of a communications channel and is measured in Hz and Mhz. kbit/s and Mbit/s are data rates, not bandwidth.
Actually, you're wrong to make that correction.
Your definition is correct, and historically your definition was more common, but bandwidth now has two definitions:
1. The numerical difference between the upper and lower frequencies of a band of electromagnetic radiation, especially an assigned range of radio frequencies.
2. The amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time.
So when being pedantic, do it right at least.
Also note that, as people have said, bandwidth is still being used incorrectly in the article, because they can't possibly supply unlimited bandwidth, but not for the reason you state.
-Taylor
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=handbrake
Fail. Let me google that for you is only funny when its something stupidly obvious to google for. How the hell was the guy supposed to already know to google "handbrake"?
-Taylor
For short-range seeking, the shortcut keys are easier than trying to use the seek bar anyway.
Again, only true if it is convenient to have a keyboard out, and in my living room, this is not true. Even for web browsing i mostly stick to favorites on that computer and don't really ever need the keyboard.
-Taylor
...A few extra birds killed per month is an acceptable trade-off for renewable energy.
Yeah, considering the impact on air quality, it would probably save more birds than it kills!
-Taylor
Awesome, will do!
-Taylor
...In Minnesota there isn't a season on feral cat nor are they a protected species so you are free to dispatch them.
Poor kitties! I know feral cats are a big problem but that's still sad. In January my GF and i just bought two kittens that has been rescued from the wild. They are brothers and were only 4 months old when found. They are just about the cutest things i have ever seen and really light up our lives, we really love them.
The woman who found them is really cool, she basically traps ferrel cats, has them fixed, and then lets them out if they are old, or finds homes if they are young. They get to live their lives, but they don't make any more cats. Great deal.
-Taylor
Since when is double == none?
Note my use of the word "effectively". I said it has effectively no impact. I'm very careful with my words. Read the article i linked to, windows seem even worse than housecats, with over 100 million birds.
As someone said below, double x = zero for very small values of x. This is a mathematical fact, to a certain precision.
-Taylor
Just to cut off this dead birds argument before it starts... I know a guy that runs some wind farms in Cali here (the livermore ones) and as a test they decided to shut off one half of their farm for a month and see the difference in birds killed.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
You know what kills WAY more birds than that per year? Housecats. Example quote from some government study in the UK:
"In 1990, researchers estimated that "outdoor" house cats and feral cats were responsible for killing nearly 78 million small mammals and birds annually in the United Kingdom."
full link: http://library.fws.gov/Bird_Publications/songbrd.html
My mom's house also has a large window that kills a few birds a year, I'm sure for every house and building that adds up.
Point being, winds farms have effectively NO impact on birds! Thanks
-Taylor
Awesome, thanks for the tip! I'll have to check it out, I did like the UI stuff I saw in XBMC. I also recently renamed and organized all my files so they don't have the crazy filenames from the original torrents - it's very nice.
It's still too bad they can't make something like that simpler, but I'll try your suggestion.
-Taylor
Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes
Well, http://wiki.videolan.org/Mouse_Gestures then...
From your link:
left : Short time skip backward (10sec by default)
right : Short time skip forward (10sec by default)
left-up : Faster
right-up : Slower
left-down : Go to previous entry in playlist
right-down : Go to next entry in playlist
left-right : Play/Pause
right-left : Play/Pause
up : Volume up
down : Volume down
up-down : Mute Volume
down-up : Mute Volume
up-right : Change Audio track
down-right : Change Subtitle track
up-left : Enter fullscreen mode
down-left : Quit VLC
Hmm... They do ALL that and they can't add
"Single click: Play/pause"? Lame. I mean, obviously not everyone cares but it works REALLY well being able to click to pause in MPC. Gestures? Gestures are like the red-headed stepchild of interface methods - they are weird and people don't like them. Meanwhile, *clicking* the mouse, the thing it was designed to do, does nothing. I find this highly irritating.
And even if there is some way to force it, or make it work, or open some config file and change a line, why the hell isn't it standard!? It works well and fits right in where there is currently NO interface feature. It seems dead obvious to me and its simple things like that that make me question a project. Forget about pausing, who uses VLC and doesn't wish the trackbar expanded when you went full screen? I have a nice 1920x1080 TV and the trackbar is only like 600px wide. WTF? Try scrolling back 60 seconds in the godfather on a 600px wide trackbar 'cause your friend distracted you on a good part. That's damn tough, 60 seconds is only 3 pixels! if it were 1920 wide it would be 10px - tough but 3 times easier! I mean if this were a beta that would be fine but VLC has been around forever! I know they're still not at v1.0 but gmail is still in beta, so that's not always in indicator.
And the fact that it's more processor intensive than MPC? How many people are working on VLC that they can't even match MPC? MPC even streams better over a LAN at my place, which is funny because VIDEO LAN CLIENT should be better!
-Taylor