Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't say VLC has the best user interface in the world, but in no way is it as bad as the QuickTime/WinAmp [1] era UI we went through where UI looked cool but it wasn't obvious which part if it was actually functional or decoration. Not only that, but it was completely abstract in comparison to the OS's UI. VLC's interface is relatively honest in it's appearance in my opinion.

I think modern UI is becoming over simplistic - it's no longer obvious what is meant to be interacted with [2]. Humans usually have a good grasp of depth and things pretending to have depth.

I imagine OSX will eventually go the way of iOS and Android with a flat UI, where it's not obvious at all how you're supposed to interact with it. Apple products have been getting harder to use for a long time, with features such as the insane four/five finger scroll on an iPad to change apps, close windows, etc [3].

And don't even get me started with the Apple Newton [4].

[1] https://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/30000/30671/winamp...

[2] https://www.soft32.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/WIndo...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/2975857/ios/6-only-for-ipad...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

To put QuickTime and WinAmp in the same sentence? QuickTime (on windows) is one of the worst applications I've ever had the misfortune to use (it was pretty much a requirement to view many .mov files). You couldn't even play fullscreen without paying.

Winamp on the other hand, I can't name a single application that does what it does better today. Also, barely any media player today looks native either.

>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).

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.

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

"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.

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 ...).

To their credit, WinAmp and QuickTime (or any other known video player) never rotated the zoom widget with the video rotation, the lower end of which was so small it was unusable at any scale, and the entirety of which was unusable at any non-normal rotation or reflection.

https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV

That's right: the mouse target is the outlined region whose width (and thus usability) diminishes to zero towards one end. It's the most Fitts' Law Hostile user interface I've ever seen, AND it rotates sideways and upside down with the video, AND the mouse tracking doesn't work at all in 3 out of 4 rotations (or reflection), only when it's non-rotated and non-reflected: they didn't bother to transform the mouse event coordinates, just the video-resolution user interface drawing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Don't even get me started about "interlaying" the user interface INTO the video, so it looks jaggy with unreadable text, instead of "overlaying" the user interface at full screen resolution. Just look at those blocky letters "VLC ZOOM HIDE", and the ferocious jaggies on the diminishing zoom slider curve!

It's not even worth fixing any of those particular bugs in the zoom interface, because the entire concept of "interlaying" the user interface into the video is fatally flawed.

All that code needs to be printed out and burned, and VLC's entire user interface needs to be completely rearchitected from scratch by designers who know and respect Fitts' Law, so it works consistently across all platforms at all resolutions and rotations (and doesn't suck, while they're at it).

But that's not what the VLC developers want to acknowledge or work on. They're more interested in supporting the latest fashionable Anime format.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html

>FOR ANIME FANS

>New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.

But nothing for us "usability fans".

I'm not sure why you take such issue with the fact that they added new features "FOR ANIME FANS". Not every foss project is going to focus its resources where you think they should be focused. You might as well say "FOR MOBILE" and print out that entire section because it's equally not focused towards the desktop ui improvements you think are necessary. EDIT: Typo in necessary

Not just added, but headlined in their release announcement. Yet there was no "FOR USABILITY" section, and more than three years later, VLC 3.0.4 STILL has the same constellations of bugs and egregious usability issues.

I would also hazard a guess the mobile user is larger than the anime user base, and they're just as concerned with usability as the desktop users.

Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?

Is it just you who feels this way, or can you point me towards some evidence of that, please? Because if you read the VLC bug reports and discussion group, and even this thread, you can see that there are a lot of people who agree with me that VLC needs to focus more on usability. Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

Developers are not interchangeable, especially on open-source projects. The group of people who contribute their time to work on core multimedia features (like audio mixing or OpenGL shaders) has almost no overlap with the group of people who will work on UI/UX.

>Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?

Either the Anime audience is better at filing bugs and chasing the up, or the developers favoured those tasks for some reason. Perhaps the UI guy is really slow or just missing entirely.

>Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

There aren't any. It's clearly not a trade-off on developer time. For an open source project, people work on what interests them the most.

Specifically in regards to "anime fetish" - who actually cares? What difference does it make if it is an Anime crowd, people who like watching 8k raw footage, people who want to watch 3D films or whatever. What does the specific reason for a video format being worked on bring to the table, other than the fact you clearly don't like it?

I don't dislike a video format. I dislike terrible usability, and arrogant cliquish developers who refuse to even acknowledge there is a problem: not just fail to focus on it, but actually make ridiculous flippant insincere arguments that it's not a problem, in their consistent efforts to brush off repeated valid bugs reports that they get frequently from many different users, and steadfastly refuse to do anything about every single time.

And it's not a matter of anime fans being better at filing bugs. As I said, I filed some very detailed bugs, with step-by-step instructions to prove there was a problem, and they were flippantly dismissed and ignored.

At least Apple had the decency to acknowledge the universally held opinion that the QuickTime 4.0 player SUCKED, and they fixed.

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