An early look at VLC 4.0 | Hacker News Reader

An early look at VLC 4.0

dedoimedo.com

101 pointsseverine32 comments

(President of VideoLAN here)

Sorry to say, but the article is quite useless, and a bit misleading.

It's talking about a work-in-progress work, which is very far from being finished. None of those big issues are wanted.

Of course, the video being split from the UI is not wanted, and is just that the work is not finished on all the platforms. But this is per platform integration, because of composition APIs.

For example, this is what the player looks like on Windows: https://i.imgur.com/q71PzJU.png and of course, this is integrated.

As for the rest, everything is optional and will be made optional:

- you can have the menu by default, if you want it, including the File menu,

- you can disable the medialibrary, and have 0 indexation, if you don't like it,

- the player will be possible to look very closely to the 3.0 version,

- the player can be integrated in the main UI, or split,

- the overlay can be above the video, like the imgur above, or the controls can be under the video, like in 3.0.

Seriously, some of those things are even doable today, in the nightly builds. I don't think the Author saw those options.

As to why, there is a media library, it is quite simple: some people use VLC to play a video file, and they will go to the player directly, and not see the medialibrary; or for the other use cases, you launch VLC, and it has indexed your home NAS and so on.

The goal is for the UI to be the less visible, as you can see in the imgur link above. Only visible on mouse over, if need be.

Although I can see the problem with showing unfinished work, it sure is great to have user feedback before putting too much work into something that users won't want. It's always great to get early feedback. I hope the VideoLAN team sees this as an opportunity to see what users want and less of an attack on something unfinished (that might be undesirable when finally finished). There's a lot of software interfaces that undergo extremely costly UI revamps for the worse, I'm happy this is getting some public light earlier on than the final release. Some times the best path forward is "abort!"

Can you put in the installers to switch to the 3.x series ui vs the 4.x?

No, but you have a compatibility mode.

And the 3.0 version still exist.

Oh I guess I'll switch or get a new video player like mplayer.

Awesome. Thank you for the clarity and levity! Looking forward to seeing what y'all have been brewing.

Only visible on mouse over is not good for accessibility or usability. "less visible" is a usability anti-pattern.

I mostly use mpv that has this behavior and it can be annoying how often an accidental mouse movement causes the controls to appear. I suspect extremely few people, if any, will have trouble finding the controls. When it comes to video in particular, always-visible controls seem much more distracting than useful.

And as I said, this is an option.

"Accessible" should be the default, not an option. The file menu being present should be the default, not an option.

As someone who helps the elderly with their computers, I can only tell you that changing the UI ought to be done only if you have a very, very good reason, and it should be gradual.

> "Accessible" should be the default, not an option. The file menu being present should be the default, not an option.

This is your opinion. Weirdly, all the other programs are doing it differently. So maybe, your opinion is the minority, not the majority.

This reply is concerning, I hope you can improve on the current state of v4 more than making usability "an option".

Edit: I should expand. I was not too worried after reading the article, things would improve I was certain of. But this reply, upon given a straight-up question on specific usability and accessibility concerns fails fully to give a proper answer.

Thanks for the direct interaction.

I hate to hijack with an unrelated topic, but I wanted to know if the Chromecast API is is being updated/improved? It's VLC's killer feature for me, but I find it only works with about 80% of video files I try to use it with. In the other 20%, usually it just displays on the cast device as a black screen with a low opacity chromecast logo. I also have run into issues where the aspect ratio of the cast video is not properly adjusted to the target display. It would be great if you could adjust that via settings.

Thanks for making a great piece of software. I've used it happily for the past 15 years!

> There are ZERO cases where a desktop program was made better by using anything from the mobile world. ZERO.

Fully agree with the sentiment, but I think I'm actually a little on the fence or maybe even in disagreement w.r.t. VLC specifically.

I don't know how most people use the VLC UI, but personally I spend most of the time in the OS file manager and largely what I see of VLC is the player view (usually fullscreened so not even that).

If I am navigating the UI / playlists / etc. it's largely after plugging my laptop into a projector or other casting setup and am looking at VLC on a distant large screen; this is not quite a "mobile UI", but it's similar. I know VLC has a separate, different UI for Android TV, but I don't run Android TV, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If I am ever using the full VLC UI directly on my computer screen in a traditional way, I'm in the menu bar submenus or in a dedicated settings panel: these haven't really changed in 4.0, so no big deal there.

One could argue, given my use-cases above, that a change to the UI is not necessary (if I use it fully so infrequently), but I still think a larger-click-target-focused change is going to be positive for infrequent use in odd places where you might be playing video media.

In contrast, the only way I see the 4.0 UI being a negative user-experience is for users who spend a lot of time "working" in the main VLC UI without watching video. Even if you only use VLC for playing audio, surely you're not spending a lot of time browsing the library?

---

All the above said, keeping the File menu would be better. I mostly use macOS, and a bit of Linux, so I suspect this will be less of a problem for me in practice.

That is some very important feedback on what is hopefully a very early UI redesign.

To all you UI design people, Never take away the file menu. And never turn it into some kind of icon while keeping the other menus as normal menus.

I disagree, the menus take up a lot of visual space, often for stuff that isn't used all that frequently. IMO, it makes much more sense for more actions to be done as a tab off the main content rather than via menus and popup windows. IMO there should never be popup windows when not explicitly requested by the user. As people are now used to mobile-style menus, hopefully (IMO) the older style text menu headings will fairly quickly go away in general. Keeping the other menus as normal menus does not describe what is happening in this case as the pictures clearly show.

>> I disagree, the menus take up a lot of visual space, often for stuff that isn't used all that frequently

Even if I agree with that for a moment, file open, save, and save-as are very frequently used. They are the last things that should be moved, not the first.

I gave it a try (Windows version) to see for myself how it works (it is exceptionally buggy at the moment and unusable). VLC still has an oddity that I only discovered reading HN VLC threads and playing around a bit, which is that if you add files or directories to the playqueue (as they now call it to distinguish the list that will actually be playing from saved playlists) via the media menu (which is what VLC calls the file menu) or if you drag and drop then the thing you just added will play immediately, however if you right click from the playqueue and add files or directories from that menu then it will add to the end without interrupting what is curently playing, which is personally what I always want. IMO, this should be changed to have the same configurable behavior both ways but as the new design is making the media menu slightly harder to reach it is encouraging use of the way to add files that works best. There are other icons at the bottom of the playqueue but not for adding files or save as playlist, which I think there should be. The four icons currently there are loop, random, sort order, and clear playqueue.

The full menus from current VLC are there as-is under the ... icon. On Windows, the Video and Music tabs default to My Videos and My Music (this can be changed in the preferences; they should mention that and not just the network option) and can easily be added to the playqueue from there (again right clicking gives you more options than are otherwise obvious). The cone on the top bar does nothing and the left arrow changes the view to the previous view (i.e. from a video to the tabs that let you look at your media library). The button with the lines and music notes next to the ... icon shows the playqueue on the right side of the screen (up to half the screen when vlc is fullscreen).

The three lines icon on the left is not the usual mobile menu (I guess that would be three equal lines, but still it is too close IMO), but just changes the media library view to list mode. The button next to it (lines with a down arrow) changes the media library sort order. IMO, this should be changed to match what the playqueue looks like (sort icons on the bottom, not at the top). I would also change the All or Playlists tabs to a Playlists Only button and put that, the playqueue button, the ... button, and filter on the top line if there is enough space. Similarly IMO, the icons at the bottom should be able to be on the controls line if there is enough space (to give the maximum amount of space possible to the playqueue and media library).

There are still a bunch of popups for things like adding files to the playqueue if you don't use the media library or drag and drop; I'd prefer to use the space used by the media library for that (and have another tab for files outside the media library).

Overall, I like the new design personally even though I would change some things.

I've always stuck with Media Player Classic (presently the MPC-HC fork), which has held on to the spartan yet efficient interface of Windows Media Player 6.4 from 22 years ago.

I use VLC specifically so I can "cast" video to my TV.

It handles everything I throw at it, and is a good player, but until I bought the chromecast dongle I played all my media on my PC via xine and even now my muscle-memory is xine-centric.

How do you cast in VLC? Is it Chromecast or WiDi?

It's a chromecast, so I just right-click on a playing video and select "Playback | Renderer | My Device".

Looks like they are implementing most of the tenets of modern UI design:

- flat buttons

- gray on gray low contrast text

- hamburger style menu

- lots of empty space

I believe they should also add some random buttons on the title bar, otherwise it will not feel sufficiently modern when this is released.

All of those are early issues that are going to be fixed. See my post above.

Fortunately the mpv player exists now, I've found it more stable than VLC lately.

I'm a long time VLC user though, I remember it came as a no-nonsense player that came with all the codecs you need by default!

> Fortunately the mpv player exists now

Fun fact: with mpv being based upon MPlayer, it's technically older than VLC.

A feature request I always had for VLC was simply, allow me to click the video to pause it. (And also, allow me to drag the video to move it)

I figured they didn't want to do it because of their large user-base, don't change what's not broken. Maybe perhaps with v4 these small QOL things could be implemented.

But on topic, how far is VLC 4 from release? The article speaks truth, but if its still far from release then it could just be their first steps and no way near ready.

> Maybe perhaps with v4 these small QOL things could be implemented.

This is on our roadmap.

> But on topic, how far is VLC 4 from release?

Quite far, of course.

Those screenshots are worrying. It's unfair to judge it too harshly at this point in development, but we've all been burned by software making these sorts of changes.

If they do proceed with making these changes, it'll severely damage their standing with the core techie audience... the audience that installed VLC on all their friend's and family's machines.

After a long time with VLC, I've been using iina.io for a year. It's great.

the video-in-separate-window deisgn is not good

Don't worry about that, I'm almost sure that's a bug. It's the default, fallback "GUI" for the LibVLC engine. I've been using LibVLC in a .NET app I'm working on, and I've seen it appear a lot of times when I screwed something up on my side (and LibVLC probably "wasn't aware" of the UI widget in my app's window).

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