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> Geek/Pro options can be further away. If you take that to the extreme it becomes disrespectful and you'll lose those users to competitors who don't treat the

> Geek/Pro options can be further away. If you take that to the extreme it becomes disrespectful and you'll lose those users to competitors who don't treat them as second (or third) class users. A concrete example is controlling the player over a unix socket. A "geek/pro" feature to be sure, which VLC and mpv both have support for. mpv provides clear documentation of this feature while VLC provides next to zero documentation of this feature's existence, let alone how it actually works. As a "geek/pro" user, the choice between vlc and mpv couldn't be more clear. The former seems to pay lip service to UX while the later, despite promising little in the way of UX polish, actually delivers a more polished experience for anybody who might want to use these sort of features.

jbk 7y ago
Controlling the player over a unix socket is not a UI feature, almost by definition. And the rest is lack of documentation, and sure our documentation sucks, but that is far from the question here.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I disagree, these unix sockets are user interfaces, albeit not graphical user interfaces. I am a user who's trying to interface with these players, what could these be other than user interfaces? And unfortunately 'lack of documentation' is putting it lightly. VLC's barebones manpage directs users to https://www.videolan.org/doc/ https://www.videolan.org/doc/, which in turn says the documentation doesn't exist and gives the user another link to a wiki. If you dig around on the wiki you can eventually find this brief acknowledgement of the interface in question: https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfaces/#RC.2C_Telnet https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfac... Documentation is part of the user experience (who is documentation for, if not for the users?), and in this regard VLC is very poor. I think this relates to VLC treating technically inclined users like second or third class users.
  - jbk 7y ago
    Documentation is off-topic here, but we're rewriting the documentation currently here: https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html
justinclift 7y ago
As an alternative approach/concept, many CAD software packages deal with the over-abundance of options by grouping related things into "workbenches". eg There's a workbench drop down selector, with (say) "Part Design", "Drafting", "Assembly", and "FE Analysis" items listed Choosing one of these options causes the available menu options to change, displaying the appropriate items for the given task. It's a way of dealing with a lot of choice, more than can comfortably fit on a reasonable single UI window. ;)

jbk 7y ago

Controlling the player over a unix socket is not a UI feature, almost by definition. And the rest is lack of documentation, and sure our documentation sucks, but that is far from the question here.

catalogia 7y ago
I disagree, these unix sockets are user interfaces, albeit not graphical user interfaces. I am a user who's trying to interface with these players, what could these be other than user interfaces? And unfortunately 'lack of documentation' is putting it lightly. VLC's barebones manpage directs users to https://www.videolan.org/doc/ https://www.videolan.org/doc/, which in turn says the documentation doesn't exist and gives the user another link to a wiki. If you dig around on the wiki you can eventually find this brief acknowledgement of the interface in question: https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfaces/#RC.2C_Telnet https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfac... Documentation is part of the user experience (who is documentation for, if not for the users?), and in this regard VLC is very poor. I think this relates to VLC treating technically inclined users like second or third class users.
- jbk 7y ago
  Documentation is off-topic here, but we're rewriting the documentation currently here: https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html

justinclift 7y ago

As an alternative approach/concept, many CAD software packages deal with the over-abundance of options by grouping related things into "workbenches". eg There's a workbench drop down selector, with (say) "Part Design", "Drafting", "Assembly", and "FE Analysis" items listed Choosing one of these options causes the available menu options to change, displaying the appropriate items for the given task. It's a way of dealing with a lot of choice, more than can comfortably fit on a reasonable single UI window. ;)