The VideoLAN Forums

hi!
I really don't want to complain about VLC, but I think that concerning design and look there is little work to do.
what about applying the new itunes 6 style to vlc. i think that would look a lot better, because 8.4 has a lot of lacks.

cu macuserR

Agreed. VLC is such a great piece of software. It is simply indispensable. The interface though... eh. The only complaints I have about VLC relate to the interface (OS X), and those complaints seem to be growing.

0.8.5 introduces some interface foibles. The fullscreen button that used to be in the Controller window migrates to the newly redesigned playback window. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but ALL of the other playback window buttons are also in the Controller window. This is an inconsistency. With this change, the user loses visual confirmation that fullscreen mode is enabled. This is a step backwards in usability! Have the fullscreen button appear in both windows. Please fix!

Everyone has his own preference. As soon as i move it to two windows, ppl will come complaining that there is duplicity and that THAT sucks.

There is no way to satisfy everyone untill VLC becomes more advanced allowing some more advanced document like concept, and that still requires quite a few changes.

what about itunes 6 look?
would make the whole appearance look better...

what about itunes 6 look?
would make the whole appearance look better...

VLC doesn't really have the concept of a library. Personally, I think the current GUI is already good enough.

Additionally, that iTunes-style is quite hard to implement. Switching from the normal striped-look to the textured metal-look is just clicking on a check-box, while iTunes' window consists of tons of graphics and quite some code behind to glue everything together.
This will probably be as easy to do as the metal-look with the forthcoming Leopard-release of OSX, but until then, this won't be possible, because are currently already to few people to implement everything that we want to have.
The OSX interface will be re-designed in the next couple of months (it's on the TODO-list actually) to be more library-like, but it won't reflect the iTunes-way of showing stuff.

I would have to say I love the look and the added ability to adjust the player without the controller is gold.

I been looking for the option to play the video as wallpaper on my powerbook, but hell I'm happy as it is...

and just cant beat the price!

...and not the look. I almost exclusively use VLC for watching DVDs and have a few minor quibbles:

• More full-featured showing and hiding of the controler: The shortcut for showing the controler could be made to toggle its visibility. In general, I like how Apple has implemented showing and hiding the controler in its DVD Player: not moving the cursor for a certain interval of time hides the controler, moving the cursor again shows the controler. Furthermore, moving to the top of the screen reveals the menu bar in full screen mode. This idea is independent of whether the controler is a separate window or part of the main window. In fact, the Mac OS X slide show and QuickTime player are examples of full screen user interfaces where the controler has been merged with the main window and also is shown on-demand only.
• If the controler is active, the DVD menus don't react to the arrow keys, neither does pausing via space.
• DVD Menu: The command to go to the DVD menu is hard to reach in a nested menu and does not even have a shortcut.
• Cycling through subtitles (with the "s" key): showing the total number of subtitle tracks (in addition to the number of the current track) would be helpful.
• What is in the controler: again, the Apple DVD Player controler has a very sensible collection of features that would be worth copying (at least for DVD playback, not sure about other use cases...).
• Single-stepping through frames. Handy for some scenes, slowing down playback speed is not quite the same.

These items are not meant as complaints, but rather as observations that might be useful to others.

Axel