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>Winamp on the other hand, I can't name a single application that does what it does better today. I'm talking UI, not functionality. Functionality wise - I am

by bArray 8y ago

>Winamp on the other hand, I can't name a single application that does what it does better today. I'm talking UI, not functionality. Functionality wise - I am just as in love with the old WinAmp. And regarding UI, it was awesome that people could re-skin it! >Also, barely any media player today looks native either. Of course, but some do a better job than others I think. I think VLC appears more native anyway (it uses native menus and dialogue for menus).

tjoff 8y ago
I stand by my point both in terms of functionality, UI and UX. VLC is quite bad in comparison I think, but it is hard to compare the two.
DonHopkins 8y ago
Do you really call VLC's "interlayed" "VLC ZOOM HIDE" user interface I described in detail in my bug report (that was brushed off and still a bug years later) a "native" user interface? It's absolutely not. Go back and read what I wrote, because you're totally missing the point. Both the UI and the functionality are terribly broken. Do you actually believe it's a good idea, or that there is any possible justification, for VLC to NOT use a native user interface, and instead draw the user interface INTO the video at video resolution, and rotating it with the video, but not rotating the mouse events (so it is absolutely UNUSABLE under rotation or reflection, and extremely hard to use even unrotated because the re-invented ugly non-standard sliders in a stupid way that flaunts Fitts' Law for no good reason), and using giant jaggy pixels and a terrible blocky font and short upper case labels so it's not too enormous for low resolution vidoes, is better than drawing a native user interface at full screen resolution with a decent full resolution anti-aliased font in the overlay that is actually usable at any video resolution, scale, rotation or reflection? Please stare into these screen snapshots for a few minutes and reflect on what I said, and then go run the latest version of VLC, and prove to yourself that it's still just as bad as I described before replying, because it is. https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV "VLC ZOOM HIDE" indeed. Look closely at the "V": It's five pixels wide, and it's so jaggy it looks like a step ladder with only 3 steps.
- ygra 8y ago
  While I'd agree that VLC is fairly bad usability-wise, concentrating on this single feature is wrong, I think. It's an obscure feature buried two or three layers deep in an effects panel that most users never see or use. VLC has a lot of features that often are rather tangential to a media player and it can sometimes act as a frontend for ffmpeg (especially the stream/convert tools). The fact that basic features, power user features and plain gimmicky crap (like the puzzle mode) are lumped in all together in one application without organization, rhyme, reason, or separation almost automatically makes for atrocious UI. With some features being added by someone who felt the need for it or needed an exercise in programming doesn't help. VLC is a kitchen sink of vaguely media-related stuff and the UI does little to hide this. One point where I'm split on is single-key hotkeys. For years it was trivial to crash VLC simply by starting to type (something that happened to me regularly when I forgot that my IM application didn't have the focus, but rather VLC). If it didn't crash, you now had the video horizontally mirrored, in greyscale, with subtitles in Ancient Sumerian and video, audio, and subtitles were all a second out of sync to each other. Good luck figuring out how to revert that. Having hotkeys only be F keys and Ctrl+something at least has the benefit that you can't mess up things accidentally, at the expense of needing chords to interact with the application via keyboard (I'd say Windows Media Player's Ctrl+P for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on which button had the focus was just as bad, but at least you couldn't crash it by typing into the wrong window by accident. As is YouTube for requiring K for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on where the focus is ...).

by bArray 8y ago

tjoff 8y ago

I stand by my point both in terms of functionality, UI and UX. VLC is quite bad in comparison I think, but it is hard to compare the two.

DonHopkins 8y ago

Do you really call VLC's "interlayed" "VLC ZOOM HIDE" user interface I described in detail in my bug report (that was brushed off and still a bug years later) a "native" user interface? It's absolutely not. Go back and read what I wrote, because you're totally missing the point. Both the UI and the functionality are terribly broken. Do you actually believe it's a good idea, or that there is any possible justification, for VLC to NOT use a native user interface, and instead draw the user interface INTO the video at video resolution, and rotating it with the video, but not rotating the mouse events (so it is absolutely UNUSABLE under rotation or reflection, and extremely hard to use even unrotated because the re-invented ugly non-standard sliders in a stupid way that flaunts Fitts' Law for no good reason), and using giant jaggy pixels and a terrible blocky font and short upper case labels so it's not too enormous for low resolution vidoes, is better than drawing a native user interface at full screen resolution with a decent full resolution anti-aliased font in the overlay that is actually usable at any video resolution, scale, rotation or reflection? Please stare into these screen snapshots for a few minutes and reflect on what I said, and then go run the latest version of VLC, and prove to yourself that it's still just as bad as I described before replying, because it is. https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV "VLC ZOOM HIDE" indeed. Look closely at the "V": It's five pixels wide, and it's so jaggy it looks like a step ladder with only 3 steps.

ygra 8y ago
While I'd agree that VLC is fairly bad usability-wise, concentrating on this single feature is wrong, I think. It's an obscure feature buried two or three layers deep in an effects panel that most users never see or use. VLC has a lot of features that often are rather tangential to a media player and it can sometimes act as a frontend for ffmpeg (especially the stream/convert tools). The fact that basic features, power user features and plain gimmicky crap (like the puzzle mode) are lumped in all together in one application without organization, rhyme, reason, or separation almost automatically makes for atrocious UI. With some features being added by someone who felt the need for it or needed an exercise in programming doesn't help. VLC is a kitchen sink of vaguely media-related stuff and the UI does little to hide this. One point where I'm split on is single-key hotkeys. For years it was trivial to crash VLC simply by starting to type (something that happened to me regularly when I forgot that my IM application didn't have the focus, but rather VLC). If it didn't crash, you now had the video horizontally mirrored, in greyscale, with subtitles in Ancient Sumerian and video, audio, and subtitles were all a second out of sync to each other. Good luck figuring out how to revert that. Having hotkeys only be F keys and Ctrl+something at least has the benefit that you can't mess up things accidentally, at the expense of needing chords to interact with the application via keyboard (I'd say Windows Media Player's Ctrl+P for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on which button had the focus was just as bad, but at least you couldn't crash it by typing into the wrong window by accident. As is YouTube for requiring K for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on where the focus is ...).