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An early look at VLC 4.0

101 pointsby severineabout 4 years ago

10 comments

jbkabout 4 years ago
(President of VideoLAN here)<p>Sorry to say, but the article is quite useless, and a bit misleading.<p>It&#x27;s talking about a work-in-progress work, which is very far from being finished. None of those big issues are wanted.<p>Of course, the video being split from the UI is not wanted, and is just that the work is not finished on all the platforms. But this is per platform integration, because of composition APIs.<p>For example, this is what the player looks like on Windows: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;q71PzJU.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;q71PzJU.png</a> and of course, this is integrated.<p>As for the rest, everything is optional and will be made optional:<p>- you can have the menu by default, if you want it, including the File menu,<p>- you can disable the medialibrary, and have 0 indexation, if you don&#x27;t like it,<p>- the player will be possible to look very closely to the 3.0 version,<p>- the player can be integrated in the main UI, or split,<p>- the overlay can be above the video, like the imgur above, or the controls can be under the video, like in 3.0.<p>Seriously, some of those things are even doable today, in the nightly builds. I don&#x27;t think the Author saw those options.<p>As to why, there is a media library, it is quite simple: some people use VLC to play a video file, and they will go to the player directly, and not see the medialibrary; or for the other use cases, you launch VLC, and it has indexed your home NAS and so on.<p>The goal is for the UI to be the less visible, as you can see in the imgur link above. Only visible on mouse over, if need be.
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lucideerabout 4 years ago
&gt; <i>There are ZERO cases where a desktop program was made better by using anything from the mobile world. ZERO.</i><p>Fully agree with the sentiment, but I think I&#x27;m actually a little on the fence or maybe even in disagreement w.r.t. VLC specifically.<p>I don&#x27;t know how most people use the VLC UI, but personally I spend most of the time in the OS file manager and largely what I see of VLC is the player view (usually fullscreened so not even that).<p>If I am navigating the UI &#x2F; playlists &#x2F; etc. it&#x27;s largely after plugging my laptop into a projector or other casting setup and am looking at VLC on a distant large screen; this is not quite a &quot;mobile UI&quot;, but it&#x27;s similar. I know VLC has a separate, different UI for Android TV, but I don&#x27;t run Android TV, so ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>If I am ever using the full VLC UI <i>directly</i> on my computer screen in a traditional way, I&#x27;m in the menu bar submenus or in a dedicated settings panel: these haven&#x27;t really changed in 4.0, so no big deal there.<p>One could argue, given my use-cases above, that a change to the UI is not necessary (if I use it fully so infrequently), but I still think a larger-click-target-focused change is going to be positive for infrequent use in odd places where you might be playing video media.<p>In contrast, the only way I see the 4.0 UI being a negative user-experience is for users who spend a lot of time &quot;working&quot; in the main VLC UI without watching video. Even if you only use VLC for playing audio, surely you&#x27;re not spending a lot of time browsing the library?<p>---<p>All the above said, keeping the File menu would be better. I mostly use macOS, and a bit of Linux, so I suspect this will be less of a problem for me in practice.
phkahlerabout 4 years ago
That is some very important feedback on what is hopefully a very early UI redesign.<p>To all you UI design people, Never take away the file menu. And never turn it into some kind of icon while keeping the other menus as normal menus.
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shdonabout 4 years ago
I&#x27;ve always stuck with Media Player Classic (presently the MPC-HC fork), which has held on to the spartan yet efficient interface of Windows Media Player 6.4 from 22 years ago.
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BruiseLeeabout 4 years ago
Looks like they are implementing most of the tenets of modern UI design:<p>- flat buttons<p>- gray on gray low contrast text<p>- hamburger style menu<p>- lots of empty space<p>I believe they should also add some random buttons on the title bar, otherwise it will not feel sufficiently modern when this is released.
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Aardwolfabout 4 years ago
Fortunately the mpv player exists now, I&#x27;ve found it more stable than VLC lately.<p>I&#x27;m a long time VLC user though, I remember it came as a no-nonsense player that came with all the codecs you need by default!
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0xcoffeeabout 4 years ago
A feature request I always had for VLC was simply, allow me to click the video to pause it. (And also, allow me to drag the video to move it)<p>I figured they didn&#x27;t want to do it because of their large user-base, don&#x27;t change what&#x27;s not broken. Maybe perhaps with v4 these small QOL things could be implemented.<p>But on topic, how far is VLC 4 from release? The article speaks truth, but if its still far from release then it could just be their first steps and no way near ready.
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kbelderabout 4 years ago
Those screenshots are worrying. It&#x27;s unfair to judge it too harshly at this point in development, but we&#x27;ve all been burned by software making these sorts of changes.<p>If they do proceed with making these changes, it&#x27;ll severely damage their standing with the core techie audience... the audience that installed VLC on all their friend&#x27;s and family&#x27;s machines.
radoabout 4 years ago
After a long time with VLC, I&#x27;ve been using iina.io for a year. It&#x27;s great.
platzabout 4 years ago
the video-in-separate-window deisgn is not good
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