does vlc really have a zoom feature ?

[alpinestars69]

whenever i press the zoom key nothing happens what so ever if i am in full screen, if i am in normal size & press zoom key the interface or player or what ever it is called just goes to double size & if i try & zoom from there the whatever player goes to half size & jumps to the top left of the screen. can someone please explain what is happening? if vlc's idea of 'zoom' is to just jump to the next window player blah blah blah widget then you gotta be kidding. i am curious to know what is wrong & how to fix this 'ZOOM' issue

i do thank any help

[kdean]

I'm having trouble following what you're saying. What version are you using?

When you say you press the zoom key, what are you pressing?

There's various scaling options that do different things.
Pressing the Z key toggles through a few different sizes.

Pressing Command-0, Command-1, Command-2 and Command-3 trigger Half Size, Normal Size, Double Size and Fit to Screen respectively as found in the Video menu.

Pressing the Green window zoom toggles between Fit to Screen and the size the video was before toggling.

Opening "Video Effects (Command-E) -> Geometry -> Magnification/Zoom" brings up a moveable target area to zoom in a portion of the video.

If the video is not scaling with the window, then you need to either Reset All in VLC Preferences and restart VLC or quit VLC and delete "~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc". You can go directly into that folder in the Finder in the "Go" menu -> Go to Folder... and paste the quoted path.

[alpinestars69]

my version is 2.0.3 & after reading your reply i tried your instructions & the closest thing i could tell you is what magnification/zoom in video effects function does is what i was wanting. in my hot keys the z button is set up to zoom, all the other hot keys pretty much do what they say they do when you press them except for the z-zoom, it did nothing & i know some time ago i saw the zoom feature work so it just confused me why it was not zooming now. basically i want to be able to zoom in from time to time any idea what is the easiest way to go about it in vlc......

[kdean]

The easiest is just use the window sizing hotkeys Command 0 through 3.

The Z key should be toggling through a couple of default sizes. It works for me with 2.0.3.

[JayElDee]

What you're looking for is a hot key to "magnify" a portion of the screen and then another hot key or the same one pressed again to revert to a normal aspect. It does not exist afaik. This topic has been posted here a number of times and the same answer is always given, ie, press the z key. But that does not do what you want, right? It ONLY resizes the window. The holy grail is to have a full screen display and then hit a designated hot key to "magnify" the part of the screen where the cursor is.
As I siad this request has been posted a few times and no answers are forthcoming. Search on "hot-key magnification."

All that said, VLC is still my go to player

[kdean]

The holy grail is to have a full screen display and then hit a designated hot key to "magnify" the part of the screen where the cursor is.

The holy grail already exists... built in to OS X.

Read here:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103823#p351433

[JayElDee]

The holy grail already exists... built in to OS X.

Read here:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103823#p351433

[/quote]

Thanks, Kdean. That's the first (and only) response to this often asked question I've seen.
I saw that post yesterday. and it works...thanks.
But, would be nice if built into vlc. , though I suppose an argument could be made for "why reinvent the wheel."

As a sidelight to that I tried to change the "hot-key(s)" for it so that it does not require two hands to accomplish---OPT/Command/ = or -, just to make it easier physically and mentally. I tried to change it to cont/z and couldn't get that to be recognized. I did not get an OS X error message that that combo was used by something else or in conflict. Any ideas there?

and thanks again for your help.
John

[alpinestars69]

The holy grail already exists... built in to OS X.

Read here:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103823#p351433

Thanks, Kdean. That's the first (and only) response to this often asked question I've seen.
I saw that post yesterday. and it works...thanks.
But, would be nice if built into vlc. , though I suppose an argument could be made for "why reinvent the wheel."

As a sidelight to that I tried to change the "hot-key(s)" for it so that it does not require two hands to accomplish---OPT/Command/ = or -, just to make it easier physically and mentally. I tried to change it to cont/z and couldn't get that to be recognized. I did not get an OS X error message that that combo was used by something else or in conflict. Any ideas there?

and thanks again for your help.
John[/quote]

that is part of my frustration -hot keys-!! there are several functions that work with 1 push of a key the way it should be i guess if it is a hot key, right. so the -z- button says it is for zoom but it does not zoom, whatever vlc it makes no sense in so many areas & this is an example of what i mean..

[UsabilityPolice]

Mac OS/X's magnify feature is not the holy grail, because it zooms not only the entire screen, but ALL attached displays, so the contents of one display spill onto the other display.

It does not solve the problem of zooming just one display (the one you're watching the movie on) while leaving the other alone (so you can continue to do other things on your other display).

It also does not solve the problem of just zooming the VLC window itself without zooming the rest of the display (so you can zoom into part of a video and keep using the other windows on your single display).

On the other hand, the "magnify" user interface built into VLC desparately needs a keyboard interface to control it, because the mouse based user interface for controlling the magnification is just so terribly designed and implemented.

The terrible things about the design of the VLC magnification user interface are as follows:

The magnification is controlled by a curved triangular slider below the picture-in-picture. However, that triangle is rather narrow and short, so it does not have a lot of vertical precision, and the target area is small and hard to hit (especially when the window is not in full screen mode).

And to exacerbate that problem so much that it makes the mouse based magnification user interface almost impossible to use, the TARGET AREA of the vertical slider gets narrower and narrower towards the bottom, as it exactly follows the curved triangular shape of the magnification slider graphics. That was a horribly conceived idea, and on top of that, it's also horribly implemented.

The curved triangular target area is a terrible design decision, and a blatant violation of Fitt's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law

>Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.

>Fitts's law is an unusually successful and well-studied model. Experiments that reproduce Fitts's results and/or that demonstrate the applicability of Fitts's law in somewhat different situations are not difficult to perform. The measured data in such experiments often fit a straight line with a correlation coefficient of .95 or higher, a sign that the model is very accurate.

The magnification slider apparently uses a curved triangular graphic to imply that its function is to magnify, and the top of the slider is "big", and the bottom of the slider is "small", with graduated magnifications in between. The curve implies that there is some non-linear relationship between the vertical position and the magnification.

The graphic is at the same time redundant, confusing, deceptive, and ugly.

1) redundant: The user should already be well aware that the slider is used for magnification, because of the heads up display, with a label above it that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE".

The fact that the label is drawn in an ugly, low resolution, upper case font, with very little space between each word, and that the word "VLC" is redundant because we already know we're using VLC, and it serves no useful purpose and just wastes precious space.

There is no affordance to suggest the word "HIDE" is a button that hides the magnification HUD, or that the word "VLC" and the word "ZOOM" are not buttons, so the user has to click on them to discover their functionality. Does clicking the word "ZOOM" zoom somehow, like clicking the word "HIDE" hides? apparently not. What does clicking the word "VLC" do? Why is it there?

The label should simply say "Magnification" in a non-ugly, readable font, so there is no confusion about the meaning of the slider below it, and the "HIDE" label should actually look like a button. Call it "Zoom" or call it "Magnification", but not "Magnification/Zoom". Using two names for the same function in some places, but one name in other places, is inconsistent and confusing (see below). Pick ONE. Stick with it consistently. I suggest "Zoom" since it's a shorter word, and more related to video.

If the label was easier to read and understand, and not confused with a button, then there would be no need to go to such elaborate effort to make the zoom slider look like a curved triangle, at the expense of making it extremely hard to click with the mouse at the lower end.

2) confusing: it's ambiguous what the narrow to wide continuum of the curved triangle actually means, and how it relates to the zoom value.

The "wide/narrow" continuum of the slider could relate to the size of rectangle showing the area you're zooming into on the picture-in-picture above is large/small" where wide top of slider = large rectangle = low zoom value, and narrow bottom of slider = small rectangle = high zoom value. That's a perfectly reasonable (and visually obvious) interpretation, yet it's the opposite of how it actually works.

Or the "wide/narrow" continuum of the slider could relate to the numerical value of the zoom scale is large/small" where wide top of slider = large numerical zoom value = high zoom = small rectangle in PIP, and narrow bottom of slider = small numerical zoom value = low zoom = big rectangle in PIP. That is how it is actually implemented.

But the obvious visual interpretation is superior to the non-obvious mathematical interpretation. This is a textbook case of the programmer's mathematical model (of a numerical zoom value) inappropriately imposing on the user's visual model (I want to make that rectangle I see on the screen larger, so I drag the slider towards the larger end).


3) ugly: The slider is apparently drawn at the resolution of the video, with an extremely ugly aliased jagged stair-stepped curve.

Drawing an unaliased straight line with giant sharp square pixles is ugly, but trying to draw a curve that way is much uglier.

And to what effect? What is the purpose of the curve? What message is it trying to get across, and how important is that message? And what effect does the shape of that curve have on its usability?

The message the ugly curve is trying to communicate is apparently that there is a non-linear relationship between the vertical slider position, and the zoom level. Is that important? Does the user care?

I certainly don't think so, especially given the extremely coarse resolution of the slider, and the fact that the user instantly sees the effect of the zooming as they change the slider, and has to live with picking between the few number of possible zoom scales afforded by the giant stair step pixels of the zoom slider.

And what are the consequences of shaping the zoom slider like a curved triangle, whose curve only serves to make the triangle NARROWER with LESS AREA? The consequences are that it DRASTICALLY REDUCES THE TARGET AREA BY MORE THAN HALF, especially near the bottom, so there are only a couple of zoom scale available at the lower end, and they require extremely precise mouse movement to select.

So summarize: The idea of drawing the zoom slider as a curved triangle was terribly ill-conceived. And on top of that, the notion of limiting the target area to that small area is absolutely insane, bordering on malicious.

Programming it to work that way must have taken a lot of extra effort above and beyond what it would have taken to simply have a normal rectangular slider, with no ugly diagonal or curved stairsteps, and without reducing the target area by more than 50%.

I just cannot understand the though process that went into designing and implementing such a terrible user interface, unless the intention was to actually make it uglier, harder to use, and annoying to the user. Because the end result certainly qualifies for all of that criticism.

The terrible things about the implementation of the VLC magnification user interface are as follows:

1) On a two screen Mac, it only works on one of the displays, and ignores all mouse input when in either windowed mode or full screen mode on the other display.

2) When rotating or transforming the video, the ugly graphics follow the transform, but it ignores mouse input, and/or responds to mouse input in the wrong place. It is apparently not aware of the transform when it comes to mouse input, but is actually drawing on the video BEFORE the transform.

That explains why it's terribly pixelated: the user interface should be drawn ON TOP of the video, at SCREEN RESOLUTION, and it should be able to respond to the FULL RESOLUTION of the mouse input in the SAME coordinate system as it was drawn, including on retina displays.

3) And to top it off, there should certainly be keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out and panning the zoom rectangle, both continuouly and in larger intervals, because the mouse based user interface is just so terribly unusable.

4) When looping a video, it resets the zoom. There should be a way to control whether or not it resets the magnification when switching videos (either looping to the same one or changing to a different one).

5) Even when the video is show on the one display on which the zoom interface is actually capable of receiving mouse input, and the video is not transformed in any way that confuses it, the mouse tracking is till inconsistent and flakey, so you can't always just press and drag to move the rectangle or change to zoom continuously. It should ALWAYS allow you to press and drag to continuously to change the zoom rectangle position or zoom level, no matter which screen you're on, and no matter what the transformation is. Is that too much to expect?

It really astounds me how terrible VLC's "Magnification/Zoom" user interface is. It belongs in the User Interface Hall of Shame. http://www.interfacehallofshame.eu/www. ... /shame.htm

[dfuhrmann]

Sorry, but instead writing your really long post, you would better do fill a short and precise enchanchment request at your bug tracker for this issue. Actually, I stopped reading in the middle.
Note that VLC is developed by volunteers in their spare time. So you are very welcome to support us, as said by filling proper and short bug reports, as well as code contributions if possible.

Btw, I agree with you that the zoom "interface" is suboptimal. But as said, some volunteer needs to step up to improve it.

[UsabilityPolice]

Of course, I was planning on filing a lot of bugs.

But of course I also want to discuss the bugs here FIRST, to give anybody who thinks so the chance to chime in that it's designed to work that way on purpose, or that they don't consider it a bug for some reason.

Since there are just so many problems, I want to discuss them first, so can target my bug reports on the problems that might actually have a chance of getting fixed, and not waste my time if nobody agrees that these are actually bugs, if the consensus is that it works this terrible way because that was how it was designed to work and there is no interest in acknowledging the problems and fixing them.

It looks to me like somebody really went out of there way to design and implement the "zoom/magnification" interface the way it currently is, since obviously it would have been a lot simpler to use a normal rectangular slider, and to draw a rectangle instead of a stair stepped curved triangle, and to not limit the mouse tracking to that less-than-half-sized area.

So of course I would like to know what the rationale behind that design is, and if it's somebody's sacred cow that they don't want to change, since my analysis of WHY it's that way is purely speculation.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my message after reading half of it, but I would prefer to discuss it with people who have actually taken the time to read my entire message, and I would hope that bug reports would get at least that much attention. If nobody's going to bother to read my entire message or any of my bug reports, then it's a waste of time for me to fill out multiple bug reports, isn't it?

So does anyone know WHY the zoom/magnification user interface was designed this way, or is there anyone who thinks that there is anything about it that doesn't totally suck?

Before wasting my time writing a bunch of bug reports, I want to know if this is a "known limitation" that people just make excuses for like "it's quirky", and suggest half-assed solutions for, like "The holy grail already exists... built in to OS X.", and like the terrible playlist infinite loop bug that nobody wants to acknowledge is such a big problem? Because if "That's not really a bug. VLC is doing what you told it to..." then I'm not going to waste my time writing a bunch of bug reports that will be ignored.

These kind of replies are the reason I want to discuss the issues FIRST before wasting my time writing bug reports that will be ignored:

A typical example is Jean-Baptiste Kempf's rude one letter brush-off reply, which proves that Jean-Baptiste did not actually read or understand the detailed problem description that JayElDee wrote, but instead Jean-Baptiste just brushed JayElDee off with a single letter reply: "z" (AFTER JayElDee specifically said that "Using the z key does NOT address the question"), in response to which JayElDee politely asked "Thanks for the response, Jean-Baptiste, but you did NOT read what I wrote. ... Please read my original question again", and to which Jean-Baptiste Kempf has never responded in more than two years.

If Jean-Baptiste Kempf is confused by the nomenclature of "Zoom" versus "Magnification", that just proves my point that the user interface is incorrect to use BOTH terms in one place, and just one term ("ZOOM", in an upper case, extremely ugly, pixelated font) in another place. If English is not your primary language, then that's an even better argument for the interface not to use confusing, inconsistent terms. Since it confuses one of the developers so much, then OF COURSE it also confuses the poor users, who aren't intimately familiar with the code.

So you can certainly understand why I want to make sure that I'm not going to brushed off and ignored due to lack of reading comprehension just like that incident, before wasting my time filling out multiple bug reports that will also be misunderstood and ignored.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... om#p343328

hot key magnification. does it exist?

Post by JayElDee » Tue Jun 12, 2012 10:38 pm

Running Lion and vlc 2.0.2

is there a hot key available for the "magnification" function so that the multi step routine
>>Window...video filters...geometry...check box magnification/zoom...X out-to clear black box<<
can be bypassed and accomplished while a video is running and without obstructing the screen display?

And a reverse back, a "zoom out" stepwise to normal viewing to avoid
Window...Video filters...Geometry...uncheck box magnification/zoom...X out to clear the black box?

In order to go in and out of magnification, or as it is usually called "zoom" (but not in vlc as that refers to window size) requires 10 steps.

That's 10 steps to simply "zoom" in and out. Really like the program and appreciate the work, but no hotkey to "zoom" or "magnify" in and out on the fly is a frustrating lack of ease.
Thanks

John
JayElDee

Re: hot key magnification. does it exist?
Post by Jean-Baptiste Kempf » Sat Jun 23, 2012 3:06 pm

z

Re: hot key magnification. does it exist?
Post by JayElDee » Mon Jul 02, 2012 5:48 am

Thanks for the response, Jean-Baptiste, but you did NOT read what I wrote.
your answer

z

changes the size of the window, it does double the size, but that is NOT what the people in this thread, and similar threads are seeking.
Please read my original question again. Maybe you, too, are confused by the nomenclature. Zoom ("z") is NOT the same as magnification.
Thanks

John
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 23#p351433

Re: Interactive zoom not working

Postby kdean » Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:07 pm

It's quirky. You don't drag. You just click in the small image and the rectangle will jump to that position.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... te#p388763

Re: Infinite loop on missing files

Postby Jean-Baptiste Kempf » Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:08 am

Known limitation.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... te#p332854
Re: Infinite loop on playlist

Postby Rémi Denis-Courmont » Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:15 pm

That's not really a bug. VLC is doing what you told it to...

The obvious solution would be to stop the playlist whenever an error occurs. But that would probably cause even more frustrations...

[dfuhrmann]

Of course, I was planning on filing a lot of bugs.

No. Please do not fill a lot of bugs. Just one will be enough. And I think you can describe the problem also in two small paragraphs, not on a whole page.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my message after reading half of it, but I would prefer to discuss it with people who have actually taken the time to read my entire message

Your messages are really too long. You cannot expect to read all of it. And it is not needed at all to have a long discussion about the bug. Finally, please do not feel angry or ignored if we only give short answers. Its just that we do not have time to read romans and having long discussions of details, if we think its not needed.

To give some short answers:
Currently, the "UI" is "hand-drawn" onto the video, so there is no sophisticated slider with a scale or something on it. It would be rather cumbersome. Thats probably why it was not improved so far.
Finally, I'm _not_ asking you to fill plenty of bugs how worse the UI is. One bug is enough, and if you briefly(!) describe (or better make a picture) how it might be improved, then its all fine.

And please do not mix and (improperly) cite other threads into your already really long answer. If you have a general issue, you are welcome to open another thread or stay at the original thread.

[UsabilityPolice]

I don't think you're reading what I wrote. I described a lot of bugs related to different parts of the system, and most of them took at least one paragraph to describe.

Do you really believe that somebody is going to sit down and fix ALL of those different bugs in one sitting, even though they and not all directly related, and span different parts of the system? And that it's possible to describe all of those bugs in "two small paragraphs"? Or do you want me to submit all those bug reports for different parts of the system at once in one bug report, so you can more easily close it down as "will not fix" -- if that's the case, please tell me now and save me the trouble of submitting the bug.

If you're really serious, and didn't just skim over what I wrote without actually reading it, then can you please write those two small paragraphs, and I will tell you if you've missed anything. Because I do not think I am a good enough writer to describe all of those bugs in "two small paragraphs" myself.

I don't understand why you think a normal rectangular slider that operates at screen resolution and has a rectangular target area instead of a stair-stepped curving triangle would be more "sophisticated" than what is currently (and terribly) implemented. And yes the current terrible slider DOES have a scale on it, which I criticized as useless and misleading, and which ALREADY IS extremely cumbersome, and I did NOT ask for a scale or a sophisticated slider, just a simple slider that did not suck.

If you had actually read what I wrote, you would remember that I pointed out that somebody obviously went way out of their way to implement that terribly designed curving triangle Fitts-Law-hostile slider FROM SCRATCH. That is my definition "ill conceived sophistication". All I want is an ordinary, non-sophisticated, off-the-shelf, every-day, unexciting, dime a dozen, well supported, automatically accessibility enabled, easy to implement, much more usable, rectangular slider, that you can easily drag and drop out of the XCode component library, which doesn't get so narrow at the bottom that it's practically impossible to target. That is not "sophisticated", in my book. Is it in yours? In this case, it would have been MUCH EASIER for whoever designed and implemented that terrible slider from scratch, to have used a stock standard (as you call it) "sophisticated" rectangular slider that didn't suck.

The reason I am discussing this on the forum before submitting these bugs, is that there is ample evidence on this forum that the VLC developers DO NOT ACTUALLY BOTHER TO READ OR COMPREHEND the messages that people post here, including the several that I cited, and apparently my own, which dfuhrmann admits to only having read half of.

Do you have any comment on Jean-Baptiste Kempf's single letter reply "z", to the message that specifically said "Using the z key does NOT address the question"? Did you read that part of my message? Did you read the thread in which he posted that message, and the messages that he was pretending to reply to, but that he obviously did not actually read or comprehend? Is that typical for the way that Jean-Baptiste Kempf and other developers respond to problems that people post: brushing them off without reading them?

What did you think of Jean-Baptiste Kempf's attitude, and the fact that he has never responded to the repeated request after two years, after it was pointed out that he did not actually read the message he was responding to?

Please do not again prove my point by responding to my message as if you did not actually read or understand it. That would be a very bad sign for the VLC project, indeed. So please read what I wrote next time, instead of replying without reading it like Jean-Baptiste Kempf did with his one letter "z" reply, or worse yet, trumpeting the fact that you didn't bother to read what I wrote, even though you did bother to reply. In that case, JUST DON'T REPLY, ok? Thanks.

[dfuhrmann]

Please calm down. I read your complete message, and I also skimmed though your linked posts.

If you want a short summary of what I got from your first long post about the magnification feature:
- triangular slider is bad form, hard to hit with mouse
- you might not see what is up and what is down
- label is drawn ugly
- font / drawing does not scale

All of these points fit quite well into one ticket.

- Problem together with rotate filter

Aggreed, this can go into another bug report.

- Its just ugly, misses hotkey support, is only per video

Can go into maybe a seperate enhanchment ticket, at these are more general feature limitation of the current functionality.

My point just is: please structure it properly. Discussion it better done in trac, per concrete problem (group), and not here in too long posts, mixed together with personal anger about the behaviour of other people.

[UsabilityPolice]

Ok, thank you for your reply. I will file those bugs this evening. I have a long list of other bugs, too, which I can file as I find the time.

There are many things about the "Video Effects" window that are terribly designed and implemented.

Is it really supposed to randomly enable the effects when you change movies, some times remembering them from movie to movie, sometimes forgetting them, sometimes even remembering between invocations of VLC, and sometimes not?

Is there some reason the "crop" dialog only lets you click on the arrows to change it from 0 to 100 pixels, but you can enter any number and it's not limited to the actual video size? And why the scale seems to be greater than pixels when cropping 90 degree rotated video? And that it's so incredibly hard to reset or change the numbers, resulting in pop-ups that scold you for entering a bad number, instead of helping you correct the error? Is there some reason the letters "px" follow the number, and it's an error to enter other letters or if you accidentally delete one of the letters? That "crop" dialog seems to be as user hostile and maliciously designed as the magnification dialog (although at least it is not drawn over the video in low resolution pixels -- even though it would be much easier to use than the four numeric fields, if that were the case and it were well designed).

There are just so many problems with so many parts of the VLC user interface, that it's extremely hard to keep it down to "a couple of small paragraphs". Is there a back story about the design and implementation of those Video Effect dialogs, and why they are so terrible? Were they done by the same person? Or did many different people contribute to them, with no overall design or code review?

Is there something about the Mac version of VLC that makes it fundamentally random and non-deterministic? Does the Windows version suffer from the same kind of unpredictability? (I only use the Mac version regularly.)

[dfuhrmann]

Ok, thank you for your reply. I will file those bugs this evening. I have a long list of other bugs, too, which I can file as I find the time.

Thanks.

Is it really supposed to randomly enable the effects when you change movies, some times remembering them from movie to movie, sometimes forgetting them, sometimes even remembering between invocations of VLC, and sometimes not?

All settings should be preserved over all videos and over VLC restarts, if you do not change anything in between. If it does not so, then there is most likely a bug. Note that depending on other options, some might just not be working (for instance, iirc if you enable hardware decoding with VDA, some video effects will not work).

Is there some reason the "crop" dialog only lets you click on the arrows to change it from 0 to 100 pixels, but you can enter any number and it's not limited to the actual video size? And why the scale seems to be greater than pixels when cropping 90 degree rotated video? And that it's so incredibly hard to reset or change the numbers, resulting in pop-ups that scold you for entering a bad number, instead of helping you correct the error?

This is a OS dialog. Why is it so hard in just entering a number, and then press enter? Anyway, just fill a bug report for that. Best is also with ideas how it would be better.

Is there some reason the letters "px" follow the number, and it's an error to enter other letters or if you accidentally delete one of the letters?

Maybe it makes sense to leave the px inside the field, and to allow to enter % additionally (to change the unit)? Or we could move the unit outside.

There are just so many problems with so many parts of the VLC user interface, that it's extremely hard to keep it down to "a couple of small paragraphs". Is there a back story about the design and implementation of those Video Effect dialogs, and why they are so terrible? Were they done by the same person? Or did many different people contribute to them, with no overall design or code review?

Feel free to open bugs and suggest improvements for all issues you find. Be sure we will read them and try to fix them. And as I said, any help will be appreciated.

[UsabilityPolice]

>All settings should be preserved over all videos and over VLC restarts, if you do not change anything in between. If it does not so, then there is most likely a bug.

It's good to know what it's SUPPOSED to be doing, instead of guessing what that is by observing what it actually IS doing. There DEFINITELY is a bug, because its behavior is extremely flakey, unreliable and unpredictable. It's as if the code is calling the random number generator to decide what to do next. There are many things about VLC that behave that way. I will file bugs against the many cases of random behavior that I have observed, now that you have a assured me that it's not supposed to be acting randomly on purpose. Because it certainly seems to.

>This is a OS dialog. Why is it so hard in just entering a number, and then press enter? Anyway, just fill a bug report for that. Best is also with ideas how it would be better.

The reason it's so hard to enter a number, is that you have to select both the number and the "px" which is separated by a space, in order to delete them before typing the new number, and it's very easy to screw that up, because the field is so small, and double or triple clicking is so unreliable, and most of the time does not actually select both words, but one or the other, or part of each, so when you type a new number, it often still has the prefix of part of the previous number, or the suffix of part of the space followed by "px", so it is syntactically invalid, then the extremely obnoxious dialog pops up and scolds me for entering an invalid syntax, without actually doing anything to help correct the problem, as I already described.

A single click simply sets the cursor position without selecting any of the text, so if you type a number, it will definitely be a syntax error.

A double click selects either the number, or the "px", or the space between them, or most likely (since the area is the largest) double clicking in the space to the left of the number selects absolutely nothing and leaves the cursor before the number. So in most of those cases, typing a number will result in a syntax error, which leads to the punishment of the obnoxious dialog:

"The value "0 px0 is invalid." Please provide a valid value. [Discard changes] [OK]" -- the escape key does NOT dismiss the dialog. The return key goes back to editing the field with the invalid value, and pressing return again pops up the same error message, so you have to type "cmd-a" to select all and then enter a correct value. Terrible user interface design.

>Maybe it makes sense to leave the px inside the field, and to allow to enter % additionally (to change the unit)? Or we could move the unit outside.

"0px" is invalid. when you type "0 px", the space does not appear until you type the "p", which leads you to think it's ignoring the space even though it's not. If you're going to REQUIRE people to type a space between "0" and "px", then you should bloody well echo it when people enter it.

The "px" suffix is totally useless. No, "10%" does not work. "10 %" does not work. "10 + 10" does not work. Nothing I can think of works. The " px" suffix is just useless decoration that does NOTHING useful but make it very easy to make a syntax error.

Again, this makes me extremely curious: WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE MIND OF THE PERSON WHO DESIGNED THIS? What could they have possibly been thinking? Yet again, somebody went WAY of their way to code up a MUCH more complicated user interface, that resulted in a MUCH harder to use and more error prone dialog that it would have been if they had just stuck to the default simplest behavior.

Really, there is no excuse for how terrible the magnification slider and the cropping dialog are: they are both much more elaborate than they should be, in ill conceived ways that make them terribly hard to use. As a developer, the numeric inputs make you guess that they might be meant to enter percentages. The fact that the up/down arrows are limited to the range of 0 to 100 also suggests that, but in fact, it's not the case. There was NO reason to limit the numbers to the range of 0 to 100, since they are not percentages, and there was NO reason to put the suffix " px" after the number, because no other suffix is valid, and it just makes the numbers harder to select by double clicking, and harder to enter, and more error prone. If it makes YOU as a developer guess incorrectly as to why it's that way and how it works, then how do you feel ordinary users fair when they have to figure it out without looking at the code?

Again, do you have any idea WHO designed and developed these terrible user interfaces? Was it the same person who invented and implemented both of these terrible features, or did a lot of different people make a lot of different uncoordinated (AND UNREVIEWED) changes that unfortunately ended up the way it is now?

These two terrible interfaces are just the tip of the iceberg -- there are many other terrible things about other parts of the user interface that I have not even touched on -- I could easily file 20 bugs against the preferences dialog. Like why does clicking on the labels AND moving to them with the arrow keys OPEN the items of the advance preferences outline, but clicking again does not close them, and pressing the standard left arrow does not close them, so you then have to press the arrow many times to move over the opened items you are not interested in, on to the next one, and there is apparently no way to close them from the keyboard, so you have to carefully aim the mouse at the tiny little arrow and click to close them (switching between the keyboard and mouse is a terrible time waster). In fact the left and right arrows, which should open and close the outline, actually JUMP FORWARD AND BACK IN TIME instead of their standard correct behavior of opening and closing the outline, while the up and down arrows navigate the outliner but do NOT invoke their video navigation functions of going to the next or previous video. Why are SOME of the arrow keys taken over to navigate the outline, but NOT all of them? One can only guess.

(Edit: I just went and tried it again and NOW THE UP AND DOWN ARROWS SWITCH TO THE PREVIOUS AND NEXT MOVIE! This is **EXACTLY** what I mean by "It's as if the code is calling the random number generator to decide what to do next." One moment, it behaves one way. The next moment, it behaves totally differently. What the hell is going on??? What is the intended behavior? How am I supposed to file a bug against it, if it's not obvious what the intended behavior is, and it behaves differently from time to time? And how do you expect me to keep my bugs "short" if there are just so many things wrong that it's impossible to describe all the problems in a single paragraph, let alone write a single set of steps to reliably reproduce the problem all the time?)

Please stop trying to re-invent user interfaces that are already standardized and well supported, with half assed quirky untested unreviewed garbage like the preferences outliner, magnification slider and cropping numeric fields! It's MUCH easier to use off-the-shelf standard native platform user interface components, that behave the way user's expect, fully support accessibility and keyboard navigation, and don't bite users in the ass, than it is to keep reinventing the square wheel and flat tire all the time.

It just goes on and on. There are SO many terrible design flaws, that I keep coming back to the same question: What the hell is wrong with the VLC design process and developer community? IS there any design process? How did it end up in such a terrible state? Does anyone review the changes? Does anyone actually use the code they develop? Does anyone actually care?

Again, I direct your attention back to this question that you ignored before:

What did you think of Jean-Baptiste Kempf's attitude, and the fact that he has never responded to the repeated request after two years, after it was pointed out that he did not actually read the message he was responding to?

His behavior suggests that no, nobody really cares, or even reads the bug reports and postings to this newsgroup. The fact that your first reaction was to try to get me to stop DISCUSSING the problems and file ONE SHORT bug report instead (when I already described more bugs in more detail than would fit in one short bug report), makes it seem like open discussion of VLC's flaws is TABOO.

Is that really the case? Well if it is NOT taboo, then please comment on what you think about Jean-Baptiste Kempf's rude dismissive attitude, and his flippant one letter reply to the very reasonable message, that PROVED that he did NOT read the message, and then his two year silence in not responding to the person who he was ignoring saying:

"Thanks for the response, Jean-Baptiste, but you did NOT read what I wrote. your answer z changes the size of the window, it does double the size, but that is NOT what the people in this thread, and similar threads are seeking. Please read my original question again. Maybe you, too, are confused by the nomenclature. Zoom ("z") is NOT the same as magnification."

Of course that kind of attitude does NOT encourage people to submit bugs. And of course it makes me want to have a nice long and detailed discussion about not only the bugs, but the attitude of the developers and the sorry state of the user interface that those developer's attitude has resulted in, even if you and other people consider that "TABOO".

So what do you say: Do you have an excuse for Jean-Baptiste's dismissive attitude and his refusal to actually read the messages he was responding to, and the way he flippantly brushed off the person who was reporting a problem, without actually reading what they wrote? Do you agree with me that that kind of attitude is a terrible problem, and discourages people from reporting bugs and contributing to the project?
Thank you!

[dfuhrmann]

>or most likely (since the area is the largest) double clicking in the space to the left of the number selects absolutely nothing and leaves the cursor before the number

Do you have a pimped osx version? Double clicking in the largest area (left from the number), does exactly what it should do: Selecting the number, you can enter a new one, press enter, and voila.

> WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE MIND OF THE PERSON WHO DESIGNED THIS?

Ask Apple. This is standard behaviour.

> Really, there is no excuse for how terrible the magnification slider and the cropping dialog are: they are both much more elaborate than they should be,.....

This is my last and friendly warning: PLEASE stop NOW to lenghly complain how terrible everything is, and how abnormal our "designer" is supposed to be. I ask you to be precise and shorter, then I am happy to fix things as I can. Else, please help us and fix some bugs yourself, this is also welcome.

> The fact that the up/down arrows are limited to the range of 0 to 100

Note that I already fixed that in 2 minutes. Please stop to lenghly complain about trivias. One short notice is enough, and it will be fixed.

> Again, do you have any idea WHO designed...

Yes, I know (most of) them. This is enough now, your tone is not acceptable anymore. You do unfair blaming about small issues, to a small group of devs who develop a FREE software on their spare time. Note that especially on the Mac platform we really lack volunteers, so not everything can be perfect.

Please start to provide a couple of patches to the mac user interface, and then we can continue discussing. In a proper tone.

> What did you think of Jean-Baptiste Kempf's attitude

Currently I am really fed of _your_ attitude. Start looking at yourself.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them...

[UsabilityPolice]

if you did less arrogant responses to long posts, maybe people wouldn't give up on trying to help you.