The VideoLAN Forums

VLC is a great program for any computer, PC or Mac, but one thing VideoLAN need to do is improve the User Interface if they want people to switch to their player full-time.

My main qualm is that you have the controls for a video (play, pause, etc) at the bottom of the video window, but yet you have the same controls on a separate window in the controller. You can close the extra controller, but everytime you open VLC it comes back. Why do we need duplicate controls? The VLC player should be in one sleek window.

Another little interface bug / quirk is the video selector bar in the main window. What happened to the edges? It looks like something from OS 9 or Windows 3.11. It's so pixelated and blurred!

It might seem like I am being unfairly harsh to the VLC player, but I can assure you that I love VLC and that's why I want it to be the best it can be. Have you guys ever thought of changing the design of VLC so it looks as beautiful as it is productive?

Why not try a something similar to semi transparent sleek black interface that Pixelmator uses? Check it out:

http://www.pixelmator.com/

What, no other user feedback...?

The video selector bar bug is fixed in 0.9.0

We are thinking about what to do to integrate the controls in the interface...

The video selector bar bug is fixed in 0.9.0

We are thinking about what to do to integrate the controls in the interface...

Why not have a public competition to see if someone can come up with a better design? After all, VLC is a popular application, and who knows, there might be someone out there who has some very cool ideas.

Doing a design is fine. Coding it is something else.

Doing a design is fine. Coding it is something else.

I am no programmer, but surely isn't it just a case of replacing your current bitmaps with the new ones?

Not really.

But, please, shout ideas.

Isn't someone working on this for Google Summer of Code?

Isn't someone working on this for Google Summer of Code?

What's that?

What's that?

Google Summer of Code

Mac OS X Projects

We have had some great ideas and feedback from Apple designers, we have ideas under the hood... More news soon.

But please, shout some ideas here.

Okay, I'll shoot

I'd like to see a playlist separate of the main controller (in HUD leopard style, like the full screen controller), and it would be awesome if it would automatically add similar filenames to the playlist. Like if you open xxx.CD1.avi, it would automatically add xxx.CD2.avi to the playlist.
Similarly, the equalizer should also be changed to the HUD style.

A quick access button for video settings like brightness, contrast, saturation etc. next to playlist and equalizer buttons would be cool.
Also, I really like the Movist interface (video display window and controller are one and the same), but I don't know if that's feasible.



Don't know if the following falls under interface, but auto centering the video to the screen would be nice.

Wow, almost a year ago I posted this and, so far, no replies at all!

j-b, any comments on these ideas I 'shouted'

Well, your patches are waited for.

About playlist, I doubt it, current design doesn't go that way.
About similar filenames, you will have this with the media library.
Equalizer in HUD style is a good idea.

Well, your patches are waited for.

About playlist, I doubt it, current design doesn't go that way.
About similar filenames, you will have this with the media library.
Equalizer in HUD style is a good idea.

What's a good place to start checking out the code for VLC? I've recently started coding for Mac, but have never contributed in a large scale project like VLC.
Is it written in Objective C and Cocoa? Is there an Xcode project?

We use git to maintain our code. See http://wiki.videolan.org/Git on how to use that.

VLC is a mixed bag of C, Obj-C and C++ code. The Mac OS X interface is mostly Objective-C. Some people on the vlc-devel mailinglist are also interested in redesigning the interface, so you might check with them. To build VLC, see http://wiki.videolan.org/OSXCompile

The macosx gui code is in the modules/gui/macosx subdirectory of our code sources. The GUI resources and Xcode project are in extras/package/macosx subdirectory.

Objective-C and Xcode and C

Check out the git and read the wiki.