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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy, we're redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we've seen.

0. A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we've had to do basic UX and looking at our users to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying). And it took a lot of time...

1. And yes, this requires to rethink some of the basics stuff for VLC usage.

2. And the nerd-porn part is very true: we solved it with 3 layers of access. Simple usage should be direct, Advanced usage for normal users should be within 2 clicks, and Geek/Pro options can be further away.

And we will have options for different usage of VLC that will impact a bit the UI (but we're making that as simple as possible, to not make the codebase too complex -> more time)

3. Finally, a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work.

I can share some of the work, if some people care...

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> we don't use telemetry/spying

Thank you for respecting user privacy, I'm sure the temptation to get more data is strong.

As a daily user of VLC, I just want to say: I only use about 10% of what it can do but I can pretty much guarantee that _my_ 10% of feature coverage doesn't match anyone else's.

This is the biggest issue we have. People use VLC for various different things, from DVD playback to audio media library to audiobooks or professional QA. Not everyone has the same needs.

The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC.

If all you see is "growing" the userbase by nuking and reworking the user interface what happens to us your existing users?

As a direct example -

I use VLC primarily as a music player for my jazz album collection. It handles many formats I throw at it. It has a simple playlist (I play albums from start to finish and do not value a lot of spazzy track selection features).

I have a nice useable interface that works well. I ignore the stuff I don't need, I know WHERE the stuff I do need is.

I use VLC because it doesn't change much year to year unlike the vast majority of flash in the pan music players that go in and out of fashion.

If you privilege growth of new users you don't care that I know where things are and how to make them work. You just reorganize things according to some "designer" that is entirely growth oriented and doesn't care about me.

> The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC.

Depending on usecase, it's quite possible that current users are successfully using it but could have a much easier time of things with some UI tweaks. It's dangerous, yes, but it can be favorable overall.

(I really don't understand this comment, nor the tone that I perceive as quite aggressive, but I may just misunderstand it. So answering anyway)

> The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC.

Some of them yes, some are complaining. Quite many, in fact.

> If all you see is "growing" the userbase by nuking and reworking the user interface what happens to us your existing users?

We're just working so that it still works for our existing users, that's exactly the point of my previous comment. It will require, at some places, to have some options, for contradictory use-cases; but mostly, we will try to support everything that we did, just simplify some cases (changes of subtitles or audio for example, chromecast or access to video effect), and provide a media library to people who listen to a lot of audio.

> I use VLC primarily as a music player for my jazz album collection. It handles many formats I throw at it. It has a simple playlist (I play albums from start to finish and do not value a lot of spazzy track selection features).

It should absolutely still work. If it does not work as before, just tell us why and we will fix. I can even send you some early designs, if you are scared.

We are in no hurry, so we'll do well. It just requires more time, which is what we have :)

> If you privilege growth of new users you don't care

Who talked about growth? We're talking about VLC! We don't make any money by having more users, on the contrary.

We just want our users to be more happy.

(I really don't understand this comment, nor the tone that I perceive as quite aggressive, but I may just misunderstand it. So answering anyway)

I understood the comment fine. Even the way you're explaining yourself makes me nervous about the changes you may or not make.

Maybe I have just been burnt so many times.

> Even the way you're explaining yourself makes me nervous about the changes you may or not make.

What part?

I explain the difficulty we have in designing something and you jump at my throat without even seeing what we do.

> (I really don't understand this comment, nor the tone that I perceive as quite aggressive, but I may just misunderstand it. So answering anyway)

I think it was a bit aggressive, though i sort of understand it: one of the most common (if not the most common) complains after a UX change in any semi-popular program is that the change was negative for some people's experience and i think everyone who has used computers for a while has experienced at least once what they perceived as unnecessary UX degradation of one of their favorite programs.

So whenever the topic of some program changing their UI (regardless of reasons) comes up, a kneejerk reaction that goes fully towards the negative side of possibilities is expected. The more time people invest in a program, the more painful it becomes when they feel that their investment becomes worthless.

(EDIT: FWIW personally i do not make any weird use of VLC, so as long as it keeps having the common minimal slider, play, pause, etc UI i doubt i'll have any problems with it :-P)

Oh sure. But we're not doing a reddit-thingie: we're doing some reskinning of the player and adding an optional media library. And improving the audio usage quite a bit.

And we're using 21st century tech to overlay controls on the player.

We're not removing features from VLC, not removing codecs, not removing options.

I didn't feel aggressive when I wrote it to you, I'm a very happy VLC user, thanks very much for working on it.

I love the fact that VLC seems to be able to play and use most any media I throw at it.

I love that I can edit the play/toolbar stuff. Awesome.

I like the fact that VLC still has menus instead of trying to mash everything into a single menu "hamburger" ie like the browsers and some others have done. I'm skilled with a mouse and even I find "hamburgers" onerous to use.

I love the fact that VLCs icons are very simple, clean and clear what they do. I really like that they haven't changed much over time.

Most things seem to be where they should be.

I don't really see anything I wish was gone.

If someone that watches a lot of anime (or whatever) or something needs a special button or context menu added somewhere so they can enjoy VLC more, I'm totally fine with that and I'll likely infer the sense of it if it appears.

> I love the fact that VLC seems to be able to play and use most any media I throw at it.

Kept

> I love that I can edit the play/toolbar stuff. Awesome.

We kept that, and we will keep that.

> I like the fact that VLC still has menus instead of trying to mash everything into a single menu "hamburger" ie like the browsers and some others have done. I'm skilled with a mouse and even I find "hamburgers" onerous to use.

No hamburger menu, and we're even removing hamburger menu from Android.

On Desktop, the menu bar is hidden by default, but can be made visible always with a simple option. So if you want it, you have it.

Not just that, but the code of the menu has not changed. So all is at the same place.

> I love the fact that VLCs icons are very simple, clean and clear what they do. I really like that they haven't changed much over time.

We don't have many icons, so there won't be any change on that. But I can give you screenshots if you want.

> Most things seem to be where they should be.

We don't change much of the player UX

> I don't really see anything I wish was gone.

We do not remove feature, again.

So again, you should mail me and I'll give you designs and you'll tell me what is missing for you.

> to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying) And it took a lot of time...

Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees.

Would love to see the work!

Agreed, telemetry is a classic case of "more data is not better data".

With a smaller number of organized sessions, you can still collect telemetry (without spying), and you can also collect all sorts of information that telemetry just won't give you.

I suspect that a hands-on approach can be cheaper, too. It's just not any fun because it doesn't give you an excuse to play with your company's Snowflake warehouse.

I think there are certain things that are hard to achieve without telemetry. Like answering the question of "how many users will finally remove (hopefully) deprecated feature X affect?" or "Does anyone actually use this on platform Y?"

Thank you for doing it!

VLC is great piece of software. However, I struggle with its UI almost every time I use it. Simple things are hard to find:

* switch subtitle track

* add external subtitles

* switch soundtrack

* add external soundtrack

It's also annoying that rewind buttons in full-screen mode and in windowed mode behave very differently.

Mail me and I'll show you the new player.

You'll tell me what you think about those.

One thing that bites me from time to time: if I run VLC from the command line with a media file as the argument, but I screw up and don't enter a valid filename (easy to do with tab-completion, with multiple files matching and then accidentally hitting Enter before completing the name), then VLC starts up and goes bonkers. I have to switch back to my terminal window and Ctrl-C to shut it down.

This is fixed, since a few versions.

> 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.

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.

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/, 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_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.

Documentation is off-topic here, but we're rewriting the documentation currently here: https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html

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. ;)

> we're redesigning VLC interface those days

why?

Because they want to I guess.

As for why they want to one obvious reason might be that the saw potential to improve it.

Kind of a weird comment, but honestly I think these are the best reasons for why a volunteer driven open source project should do anything to their ux.

> Because they want to I guess.

Because users are asking us to.

Users asked for good changes and developers wanted to do what the users wanted?

Even better!

I've never found it very usable, which I find sad because the functionality is so good. It's always been my last resort when nothing else would work, but never my first resort.

> why?

Because this is the now main complaint we receive and because the usages are changing.

But we will do our best so that the people who just use the basic player don’t have much changes for them.

Hello -and thank you. VLC is one of my favorite must-have programs, and I use it almost daily.

I do have a request. If at all possible, please make it possible to continue using the current UI and keyboard shortcuts as an alternative.

I like trying new things (skins or whatever) but I like being able to revert to the UI I'm familiar with too.

> If at all possible, please make it possible to continue using the current UI and keyboard shortcuts as an alternative.

Current UI is impossible for numerous technical reasons and for maintenance. However, there will be options so that it comes quite close to the current version.

Shortcuts are unchanged.

I had another request question if you don't mind. Is there a possibility of adding a feature of pausing a video when clicking once on the video? This is pretty much the only feature which keeps me on MPC-HC.

Yes, this will be available because of the redesign.

> But we will do our best so that the people who just use the basic player don’t have much changes for them.

Ok, thanks, I hope so ;-) I was asking because for me the UI is fine and usually when software gets "redesigned" for no apparent reason it means features get removed because "simplicity".

> I was asking because for me the UI is fine and usually when software gets "redesigned" for no apparent reason it means features get removed because "simplicity".

We are not removing features. If a feature is removed, it is a bug, and it will be fixed.

Seriously.

Hmmm, how about the problem bug you can't have "[" or "]" in the directory name of media files?

eg: /home/user/stuff/foo [192kb]

Worked fine with VLC 2.x, but VLC 3.x won't find the files in the directory.

It was really annoying having to go and manually rename lots of directories, recreate .m3u files to match, etc. Wasted hours on it. :(

Because they want to improve the usability and user experience?

yes... but thats often very subjective. In fact history has shown (for me) that what others praise as an improvement of usability and user experience is very often just a degradation of those.

See reddit, gnome, Windows 10, ... there is a long list of redesign-fails.

> See reddit, gnome, Windows 10, ... there is a long list of redesign-fails.

You know what, I 100% agree. Mail me, look at the designs we're discussing now, and tell us what does not work for you.

Are you looking at how you preserve the preferences too? I neither love nor hate the UI, which probably means it does a good job of getting out the way, but my one bug bear is things like when I turn off sub-titles they get re-added on the next video.

> Are you looking at how you preserve the preferences too?

Yes, per media preferences for subs and filter.

> a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work

Good things rarely are produced with a "design by committee" process.

> Good things rarely are produced with a "design by committee" process.

Technical design of the VLC core is done a small number of people and we've always found consensus without bloat.

But for design, you are correct.

I'm not sure a small number of like-minded people could be considered a committee though.

Agreed. But for design, even 10 people is sometimes too much :)

I think this might make fantastic fodder for discussion -- both the actual design, and the process of going about the redesign in an organization like the VLC project.

A blog post, maybe?

When we are finished maybe.

From a non-power user: I'd love to see the handling of subtitles becoming a bit more intuitive, specifically as to syncing them with the movie. Ideally, I'd match a sentence in the movie to the same sentence in the subtitles instead of having to iteratively mess with the delay so that the subtitles fit.

And thanks for the great tool!

This is in VLC. And there is a UI tool to do that in next release.

Great!

At least on Android, VLC UX is quite professional-ish. I never had a problem with finding something. Maybe because I am power user. But my non-poweruser friends are also happy with VLC.

Because we did the work of UX/UI on Android, not on Windows.

Please do share the work!

Mail me.

I love VLC. Thank you. That is all.

> we don't use telemetry/spying

Telemetry can perfectly be done in a privacy-conscious way. Getting real user feedback is paramount, but telemetry is super important as well because it has a scale that you can't achieve just by asking users.

What would you hope to learn from telemetry on a video player? Stats on the use of specific features? Formats? Codecs? Errors? I'm wondering if it's worth the hassle. Each of these is nontrivial if you really want to be privacy-conscious. Data can easily identify porn watchers, pirates, possibly journalists in conflict zones... and police only has to say cheese pizza to get all the logs.

Most non-open source players and codecs do that, btw. It is insane.

In the case of VLC, telemetry would help to know which options are used the most and which ones are not. It could help knowing which menus are never accessed.

Besides that, no idea.

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