> "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation." I agree with this. Even if the customer is a world-class dev

> "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation." I agree with this. Even if the customer is a world-class developer. > Anyhow, VLC gets the preferences options perfect. The UI can use a bit of work and the UX is a bit rough, but the multitude of options makes up for any shortcomings it may otherwise have. I don't see how they're even close to "perfect". Yes, there are a lot of options, but when the average user doesn't know what options he might actually want or need to enable, that's not exactly, well, helpful. Here are a bunch of issues I have with the current set of options on the Simple page: 1. Interface: "Resize interface to video size". What in the world does this mean? If I play 1080p video on my 1600x900 monitor will the video suddenly expand beyond the monitor size and I won't be able to close it? Why would I want that? 2. Audio: "Enable audio"... er, you can already mute or set the volume to zero on your computer whether globally or for VLC itself, and you can set the volume near zero within VLC just for playback too, and you can mute the volume within VLC. Why in the world is there another option in Preferences? What's the difference? Is this supposed to be intuitive? 3. Audio: "Replay gain mode: None/Track/Album" in the "simple" options... you expect a non-"advanced" user to know what this means? And the tooltip is ever so helpful: "Select the replay gain mode"! 4. Video: "Use hardware YUV->RGB conversions"... this is a Simple setting? How/why is an average user (or even a power user) supposed to care about this? Do you ever worry about it? 5. Video: "Enable video"... er, why not just let users hide the video from the video playback (e.g. drag & collapse, or with a button)? Why in the world is this a global setting for the entire player? 6. Codecs: "x264 preset and tuning selection"... even as a developer I have literally no idea what "ultrafast" and "slower" and "placebo" as well as what "film" or "psnr" or "grain" imply, or why I would ever need to change them. Isn't this a clearly advanced setting? These are the kinds of drop-down options you expect to a hastily-written GUI front-end of a command-line tool that just expects the user to "know" the right thing to do somehow. etc. Putting all possible options there is half the battle. The harder part is making it so the user would actually use them. VLC still has a long ways to go for the latter, unless its target audience is multimedia experts.