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Comment by ElliotH | Hacker News Reader

There's a lesson in how to make a product in VLC's success. It has a horribly unfriendly interface, and is certainly not pretty, but it doesn't matter - Whatever media file you point it at, you can feel confident that VLC will play it, without hassle.

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The interface might not be the prettiest, but I don't think it's "horribly unfriendly". Can you contrast it with another player? I have been using vlc for a long time now and although I just switched to Mac OS, I can't say that I find other players on the platform particularly appealing. But again I think it depends on what you do it. In my case its usually either in minimized mode or playing a movie on full screen mode, making my contact with its UI very limited.

mplayer, for example, is just as capably at playing just about any media format, but is definitely far more user-unfriendly than vlc

I disagree.

Regarding user-friendliness they are about the same to me. Can you point out something that I maybe missed that makes mplayer "definitely far more user-friendly than vlc"? (not rude, just curious)

edit: missed a word

Let's start with the fact that mplayer is a command line only interaction program, if you want to discuss real usability, which GUI for mplayer are you using?

While it does require some terminal skills, as far as playing or streaming any media file and skipping left and right a bit (the largest part of my contact with a media player) or shuffling through a music library goes, I find it far easier to work with.

I feel that people too often confuse a user-friendly interface with an intuitive or noob-friendly one. But I guess seeing as most programs' user base's large majority are non-technical people that's fair.

I agree. It's ugly, but the interface loads quickly, makes it easy to skip ads/chapters/include subtitles (even if those subtitles are .srt's), easy to change playback speed, etc.

Just like with website design-it's the UX that matters, not how pretty the app is.

I couldn't find an easy way to disable subtitles completely for all videos I watched. After searching through the forums, the way to do that is to set the default subtitle track in the advanced Input/Codecs settings to a really high number, or you have to go to the advanced Video section and disable "sub pictures". WTF. It's those kind of things that drive me crazy. They do a lot of great things to make their system flexible, and then stop just short of making it usable. Instead of calling it "sub pictures", just call it "sub titles", and it'd be obvious to me how to disable sub titles. Or in the codecs section, have a checkbox to disable subtitles (which would set the default track to some high number for me). I would consider that "unfriendly".

Except when it doesn't. I don't know if they fixed .mkv support yet, but last time I tried (a year ago?) the artifacts were terrible.

Still my fallback if mpc-hc doesn't play something though. But that's rare.

"It just works."

Strangely reminiscent of the success of Apple products.

Except, arguably, for QuickTime which, for half the media I care about, just doesn't work.

Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall myself having grave difficulty with certain Real Media files as well.

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