I'm not sure whether this is meant to be a media organiser or a media player – it looks like it may be attempting to do both, but succeeding at doing neither well.
I would have been happier if the route taken was more similar to QuickTime, pairing minimal, well considered and incredibly simple UI with VLC's bulletproof playback.
Give it a shot. In practice, it's not complicated. Double-clicking a file leads directly to the player window bypassing the playlist/media library.
If you launch VLC by itself, it opens that window and that window is really just a playlist with other options at the side. Honestly, try it. It's just like the old VLC but with a cleaned up interface. There are zero new features, everything you see in that screenshot would show up if you drag the corner of the controller out, albeit with a somewhat different UI. Now it just shows up by default.
As someone who basically only uses the player window and the playlist on occasion, I'm happy. They cleaned up the two most important and commonly used aspects of VLC.
I've been told by unnamed Apple employees that VLC is the #2 application on OS X for bug reports (the #1 being Safari). Whilst I too have had very little problems with VLC's stability - apparently the whole truth is far different.
To be fair, it's the number two crasher for the same reason Safari is the number one crasher.
VLC is very stable nowadays, but just like Safari tons of people use it, and people ask it to process really random and broken data without batting an eyelid. Broken or corrupted video? VLC will play it. Half downloaded file in some obscure format? VLC. Bittorrent download that only got to 75%? Yes, VLC will play it (glitching through the missing parts).
That does result in crashes, because unlike say, QuickTime which will simply refuse to play something if it doesn't like the cut of it's jib, VLC will attempt to play anything and everything you throw at it. Just like Safari will attempt to render any data you throw at it.
Great point. VLC is my go-to application for playing just about everything, but especially files that are broken or corrupted. I love when it offers to repair the video.
VLC crashes reasonably often for me. More than anything else (besides Mail.app after Lion came out, which kept crashing while typing emails... ugh. and still does, but rarely). The cause is watching videos at 2x-3x speed and then skipping around in it quickly (usually with the 1 min jump forward command a few times).
Maybe the video files I'm watching suck, but it shouldn't crash when seeking or playing just because the data sucks.
On a related note, sometimes the sound breaks. You hear a popping sound and to fix it you have to do stuff like slow the video down then change the volume. Then it fixes itself then go back how it was.
This seems to be related to particular videos, presumably they suck in some way. But it still shouldn't happen. Or at least it should fix itself automatically without me having to do the equivalent of punching the TV to get it to try again.
I can deal with sounds getting garbled here and there when playing at high speed if it can't keep up for some reason, but it shouldn't stay broken indefinitely until I manually fiddle with the playback speed and volume and maybe pause/unpause. That is VLC's fault. Glitch the broken parts but then stop glitching afterwards please. That's how visual issues work (sometimes some frames are screwed up but it fixes itself at the next keyframe I think).
Maybe higher speed playback is an area that receives little attention and I guess it can't be the cause of most VLC crashes since most people never use it. But still, please don't tell me VLC is stable. And there's no reason bad data should cause crashes or indefinite non-recovery from glitches.
(However, it has gotten more stable over time. It used to crash considerably more, and there was a nasty bug when a video ended in fullscreen mode (crash? i actually forgot) which they have fixed, albeit by wasting about 5 seconds of your time in video ending mode with no way to exit it or use your computer, before it goes back to window mode or accepts commands.)
I agree in part, but is it too hard to prevent the entire player from crashing when it encounters bad data? I'd much prefer a frown-face icon like chrome for a crashed plug-in to a crash of the entire player.
It looks like a media organizer with the complicated sidebar. Once you switch off that side bar (I assume you can because the second two screenshots don't have one) it looks like the good-old simple VLC player.
I think they may have just put these screenshots in the wrong order. If the simple player screenshot was placed center stage, and the sidebar / drag and drop screenshots had lower priority people would be like: "It's modern redesign of the controls, and there's a sidebar too if you fancy it."
I'm currently downloading this now to make a fair comparison. I always saw VLC as I see VIM, it's an editor, it's great for editing, but it's not an IDE. My sudden though upon seeing this is something similar, VLC is a great media player, but I wasn't expecting it to become a Media Library/Organiser/Environment.
I'll offer some feedback:
- This sidebar is useless. Once I've hidden the unwanted items I am left with Library -> Playlist. I don't care about Internet/My Computer/Local Network. This design only works in iTunes because it has more to offer such as Playlists!
- There needs to be a way to go back to the previous gui, perhaps a 'Mini mode player'
- Only 3 options in the Playlist/Library view of columns, "Name, Author Duration".
- I'm not sure why My Music/My Pictures/My Videos exists.
Wow, I'm blown away. VLC has always has the best interface in OS X of all platforms but now the others aren't even comparable. I hope they have big things in store for the Windows & Linux interface, the lag is even more glaring now.
beyond that, its probably the most robust / flexible media player available. I've actually been using the alpha release of 2.0 for a few months now, and I've been very happy overall
I don't understand the negativity. Am I using the same VLC 1.x as everyone else? One that has two different windows, one for controls and one for video, with the one for controls always showing a playlist? If anything, the new design de-emphasizes the playlist and reduces complexity.
Looking forward to it. I used to use Perian, but Lion's Finder does not allow one to not show previews of files anymore. Navigating through a directory of videos with the arrow keys is like walking through a minefield now. Every tap will trigger the preview generation of some bizarre video plugin and before you get to the file you want to watch, something crashes. I keep Perian uninstalled to get rid of the previews now, and use VLC for everything.
The spacing is off. The gap between the maximum volume icon and the toggles on the lower left is inconsistent with the rest of the spacing in the bottom bar area, as is the spacing on the gaps between the chrome edge and the button groups (left side looks like it has a bigger gap than the right).
The search bar border should not be flush with the border of it's containing view, maybe a 3-4 pixel gap would be pleasing.
I began switching from VLC to MPlayerX for most of my media files because I liked the auto-hiding UI, showing only the video when not hovering the application. Will this be the same deal? If so, I'll switch back on release-day.
I've tried it now, and sadly this is not the case. There also appears to be a very annoying two-second delay between using the soundlevel-controller and the level of the sound actually changing. I would love to see both of these things resolved in a release in a not too distant future. If you happen to have had certain reasons for not making an auto-hiding UI by default, please provide it as an option instead.
"NB: Development of the interface wouldn't have been possible without a stipend from Google Inc. as part of Google Summer of Code 2011, which allowed me to work on it fulltime without worries."
I'm staying with MPlayerX because of its non-intrusive, simple design. This toolbar too bluntly tries to mimic hardware video players, and takes worst from them.
“Play”, which is about the only useful control the toolbar except for the slider, is located in the lower left corner between two “Move” buttons. On a 17' screen, it is too easy to miss. This makes it useless. I would hate to skip a couple of scenes the moment I wanted to pause just because I missed about 16 pixels.
I can't see the point of “Stop” button. It's not a home video player. If you want to stop the video, just close the window. If you want to pause, just pause. You don't need a stop.
Then there are these “play order” buttons. Come on, do you really watch 20 videos in row? There's a YouTube for that. Useless.
Equalizer?
It's painful to see so little space left for the slider. People use toolbar to scroll through the movie! Finding the exact scene will be extraordinary difficult because unneeded buttons take most of the space.
Do an experiment. Release a beta version that tracks each click. Generate usage heat map for all controls on the toolbar. Make most used items large and simple to hit (place them in the center). Get rid of the rest.
I'm also staying with MPlayerX because of its preferences window. Last time I checked, VLC's preferences were complicated as hell, and there were three different ways of setting subtitle font, none of them working.
> I can't see the point of “Stop” button. It's not a home video player. If you want to stop the video, just close the window. If you want to pause, just pause. You don't need a stop.
No, you do not need a stop button, in your use. Stop and pause are very different for Discs and streams (and timeshifting). How do you navigate in your playlist when the video is just paused?
> Then there are these “play order” buttons. Come on, do you really watch 20 videos in row? There's a YouTube for that. Useless.
Open a folder of video or audio. You need next and previous buttons.
> Equalizer?
Audio, Music and badly recorded video.
> It's painful to see so little space left for the slider. People use toolbar to scroll through the movie! Finding the exact scene will be extraordinary difficult because unneeded buttons take most of the space.
This will be fixed in a next release, but this is already what you want in fullscreen.
> Do an experiment. Release a beta version that tracks each click. Generate usage heat map for all controls on the toolbar. Make most used items large and simple to hit (place them in the center). Get rid of the rest.
Guess what, we did it... And all the buttons that are present are very much used. Ouch!
> Last time I checked, VLC's preferences were complicated as hell, and there were three different ways of setting subtitle font, none of them working.
The VLC GUI is sort of a mess. I think it's QT but many QT applications look just fine in Gnome. VLC doesn't. The keyboard shortcuts sometimes work, sometimes they don't: obviously a focus thing or something. The looks is different and somehow old. Various widgets aren't standard and don't always work in a standard way. For some damn reason, VLC toggles the state of the super key which I use for many keyboard shortcuts, and this means typing text doesn't work if VLC is running. Moving back and forth is cumbersome: you just can't use the arrow keys but you have to use shift and or ctrl/alt. Those can theoretically be configured but my VLC hasn't believed my new keybindings for years. The popup menus flicker when opened during a movie and they can go really deep. Changing some settings in mid-play causes restarting the movie from beginning while some settings are lost after switching DVD titles/chapters.
There's undoubtedly a lot of functionality in VLC but I kind of prefer the way of the Gnome school: things should be simple by default, and advanced configuration can be arranged in some advanced way, if needed. For example, transcoding into a file could be just a "Save as..." with a simple selection of formats. Now it opens a complex dialog with several tabs all over. Using that monster I don't always manage to reliably produce transcoded video files with VLC that generally open in any other player, and at least I know something about video encoding and container formats. Even opening a DVD disk requires clicking through a dialog whereas Totem just... well, starts playing whatever disk happens to be in the drive.
On the other hand, the quality and robustness of VLC is outstanding.
A simple, Gnome compliant GUI plugin for vlc would make it a true pleasure.
I'm at 1.1.12 that came with Ubuntu. These problems have been around for years: I'm glad they're fixed now (obviously in 1.1.13?) but I must say they apparently weren't a priority for the VLC developers.
I'm glad to hear that the keyboard shortcuts have been fixed, too. The super/Windows key problem was particularly nasty: you couldn't leave VLC running on the background if you wanted to use other programs.
This apparently means that as of 1.1.13, I can configure away the braindead movement keybindings. By default, I have to keep shift and/or ctrl pressed to jump around the movie. Plain left/right do what? Go to a mysterious Next/Prev or something? What's that and who uses that? Totem got the keyboard controls right here, unfortunately. Totem doesn't even need the modifier keys because right is a bigger jump forward than left is backward, so you can just use two keys to jiggle yourself to the right position.
The flickering popup menus can be reproed like this: play a movie (a dvd preferably), go fullscreen, right-click on the screen and try to navigate to some other DVD title or chapter. This involves a lot deep submenus and they flicker frantically while the movie is playing. Not a biggie but this has been there forever, too, and gives a shoddy impression of the user interface that adds up.
VLC needs quicker access to subtitles, and they need to search for subtitles on the web, like BSPlayer does it (if they already do this, then it must be hidden very well, and I'm not aware of it).
SMPlayer can search opensubtitles too, it's a GUI frontend to MPlayer which can play every media you throw at it. My other favourite feature in SMPlayer is that it resumes video playback from the position you closed it.
This feels like Amarok 2.0. Amarok 1.4 was great in its simplicity, then they brought in a so called UI Design Expert and the whole thing just fell apart.
It seems good to me ! UI is not that bad. Infact I prefer having media list in app. I anyways don't like current playlist UI (which I use often). Its better than that.
Moreover, I'd love to have some feature where I can include my media path once (it may be iTunes Media Library), and the app automatically shows files at those locations. It'd be even better if it could automatically show Movie name/thumb imdb link etc.
More than the UI widgets, I think the key part of the interface of a video player is whether the program is smart enough to (at least offer to) resume playing a video from wherever it was when that file was last closed.
It has always slightly boggled my mind that VLC, and many other players, don't do this.
MPlayerX (for OS X) does this, but personally I would prefer if it didn't. But that's probably because I watch a lot of short clips I'd rather have restarted, than long movies which I'd want to keep watching where I left them.
Can we have a better UI for subtitles? Maybe double clicking on a subtitle file automatically adds it to the current video, just like GOM. I seem to remember behavior like this on the Windows VLC. That seems to be my only peeve with VLC, as a non-native English speaker.
all i need is a windowless experience. minimal UI please? I've been a VLC user for 4 years until I realized I wanted a minimal UI footprint. It's video! UI is secondary.
All I need from VLC is the option to automatically save where I left off in a video so when I relaunch it, I don't have to manually navigate to where I was last.
I don't really see the need for VLC on the Mac. I use quick time with the Perian plugin and I can play pretty most common filetypes. What does VLC offer that my current setup doesn't?
(incidentally, I rarely watch video directly on my Mac these days. I mostly stream to my xbox with Rivit or to my iPad using Air Video).
I'm not sure whether this is meant to be a media organiser or a media player – it looks like it may be attempting to do both, but succeeding at doing neither well.
I would have been happier if the route taken was more similar to QuickTime, pairing minimal, well considered and incredibly simple UI with VLC's bulletproof playback.