Open source video player VLC will get a new UI this year with 4.0 launch

arstechnica.com

37 points·isaacdl··9 comments

The new interface doesn’t look too bad, seems to align with Apple’s look and feel. You can see an old prototype here https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/media_vlc/att...

What’s more scary is that they are looking at ways to monetize the program. I don’t want ad supported streams, don’t ship me that crap. I literally just want to play media files.

Maybe Microsoft should buy this company before they destroy it with greed (eeesh that felt weird to type, but I think Microsoft can be a good steward of open source)

Considering it's open-sourced, I presume nothing is stopping a no-ads community fork. Unless the license is fake open-source.

VLC is GPL2.

There's like a dozen people that do significant amounts of work on vlc. Who's going to fork it?

I hope they don't, but to be honest I'd pay/donate a few monies to them. VLC has definitely proved its usefulness to me over the last many years.

I've always felt like VLC has one of the better UIs in OSS - not that the bar is traditionally very high, but I've found it pleasant to use and I haven't had to fight to make my admittedly happy-path usages work. I'm excited to see where this goes but tentatively cautious about modern UI refreshes in general.

Now I'm scared. (Thinking of the Second-system syndrome.) The 'F' key to the rescue!

Finally. I love VLC for the options but mpv is much better for most use cases. Not to mention that they feel the absolute need to change the icon for Christmas by default.

if its not broken...

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