why so much trouble with skins

[dogcatmouse]

It`s really, really good player but I can`t understand why so much troble with skins!? I have never before seen program that needs to make so many adjustments just for changing skin. It worked out for me after one hour hard work. Imagine that - in all other programs only move I need is one click with mouse.

Sorry, but it really needs something to change!

[ipkiss]

What did you consider so complex about the instructions on the skins download page?

[crackinup]

Yes, I totally agree with you.

I just don't get it.

The player itself has more control and settings than any sane person would want. But trying to go to a decent looking skin can blow an hour of time. So instead of endlessly tweaking every imagineable control, fix the GUI !!! No, I don't want to look at the FAQ. No, I don't want to know the 17 step process to get the skin to load. No, I don't want to spend even more time here checking posts to see if a solution has been found. We've grown up with pc's and still we can't fix the problem ourselves -- then that's VideoLan's fault. Downloading, adding, and changing skins should be intuitive, not a wild goose chase. You'd think the VL guys would see this as a major priority because a lot of newbies just aren't going to take the time, they'll just go somewhere else.

Then for the skins themselves. I thought I'd finally found a decent looking skin with the Dalin Media player. A nice, sleek dark look. But it leaves the playlist sticking out in bright white, clashing with the black/blue interface while compressing the video horizontally.

VLC DEVELOPERS: Take a week off from working on the latest tweak/feature/setting that only the Lord Of The Geeks is going to use and FIX-THIS-PROBLEM.

Clueless. Absolutely clueless...

Ahem...why...I feel much better now...uh...Now I think I can go back to watching The Matrix on my Dalin Media Player which feels like a flashlight shining in my eyes...

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Please stay calm.

Then, well , we have a lot of work to do.
In general, the GUI is going to be changed in next versions.

But, for your specific problem, changing the skins should be easy with right click or Ctrl + S.
Then, for skins, we can't control all the quality and issues of all skins.

[solidox]

I arrived to this thread almost 2 years later. The problems with the skins seem to keep going. I'm a senior graphic designer, I'm more than used to interfaces and skins, and I still had to come to this forum to make a bloody skin change stick.

I don't know how it is for other people, but I find it unacceptable, the only reason that I still use VLC being that it's pretty good besides some annoying issues. Most of the people I know can't be bothered to spend a lot of time on skins.

I don't know how many people can imagine that going to "switch interface", than choosing a skin IS NOT what you have to do to actually change the skin. It did change, but I had to do that every time I wanted to use a skin. Now I found about the magic droptdown that can be saved with the preferences. I'll be waiting for 0.9.0 and see I guess.

Personally I would be happy without the skin but there is a big issue: the slider jumps crazily when you click on the timeline, to control it you have to "drag" it. I can't see why it's implemented like that, it's annoying


Problem #2:
the skins can't be maximized easily, although I can stretch it by dragging it by the corner like any other window, sort of "fake maximize" or "force maximize".

Problem #3:
while in skins2 mode, I don't have access to video controls (hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc)


As a personal suggeestion, if I may: I think you should listen to the nice people on this forum, they know what's up, they can give you a reality check once in a while. Having your head burried in a project can mess with your objectivity level.

Cheers and keep up the good work

[ipkiss]

I don't know how many people can imagine that going to "switch interface", than choosing a skin IS NOT what you have to do to actually change the skin. It did change, but I had to do that every time I wanted to use a skin. Now I found about the magic droptdown that can be saved with the preferences.

OK, here is a detailed explanation.

The problem here is to define the limit between what should be saved from one session to another and what shouldn't. For example, the Extended GUI, which allows controlling contrast/brightness/etc, is not persistent either. However, almost no-one complains about it. Why? It's exactly the same issue as what you dislike with the skins, isn't it?

In fact, since the time when VLC started to handle preferences, any change in the interface was not persistent unless done in the preferences. So, when opening a disc, you had to specify the drive letter (or device), but it was back to the default value the next time you started vlc, unless you set it once and for all in the preferences (it's still working that way btw).

Even though this behaviour makes sense for most options, it is a bit awkward for GUI settings. Thus, more and more, some GUI-specific options were remembered from one session to another (like the opened windows and their position, in the wxWidgets interface, or the last skin used and its characteristics, in the skins2 interface).

We would have done the same for the "Switch to skins" parameter, if there was not a technical issue: on Windows, the wxWidgets toolkit crashes when we switch back to the wxWidgets interface from the skins one. Said differently, we can switch to skins, but not switch back to the default interface (it simply crashes, so we deactivated the option). Now we are in front of the following choice:
- we let the situation as is, and users complain because "switching to skins" is not remembered
- we automatically switch to skins, but users who just wanted to give it a try without really wanting to use it will complain that they cannot go back to the default interface (of course they could reset the preferences, but they may not even know how to do that).
We chose the 1st one, in particular because the skins2 interface was undergoing a lot of development and it was not very stable. So being "locked" with a buggy interface was not fun

However, information to reduce users frustration can be found on the skins download page, on the forums, on irc, and with VLC 0.8.6 the installer creates a "quick shortcut" to activate the skins2 interface by default. I agree that it still lacks a FAQ entry though.

The good news is that the technical issue should disappear in VLC 0.9.0, because we get rid of the wxWidgets toolkit in favour of the QT one, and it will hopefully work better for this. The saving of the interface will then be the default (we are not opposed to that by principle, despite what you may think )

Personally I would be happy without the skin but there is a big issue: the slider jumps crazily when you click on the timeline, to control it you have to "drag" it. I can't see why it's implemented like that, it's annoying Evil or Very Mad

This is a well-known problem, discussed in hundreds of threads in the "Feature Requests" forum. The short answer is that we can't do anything about it, but the QT interface in VLC 0.9.0 won't have this problem.

the skins can't be maximized easily, although I can stretch it by dragging it by the corner like any other window, sort of "fake maximize" or "force maximize".

True. The skins engine is not yet able to do that, so no skin can implement this feature. This feature will be added one day (probably for version 0.9.0)

while in skins2 mode, I don't have access to video controls (hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc)

Same thing, the skin engine is not able to create such actions.
This feature will be added as well, when I have some time for coding...

[jmonteath]

I got confused on this too, and i think the feature is driven by programmers. The user does not need to know at all that the application is using wxWidgets. To the user, wxWidgets is a skin. But, it really is not.

So, make it all simple for us all and just use skinable interfaces standard.

James.

[dntknwhw2b]

Just a thought. I use WindowsBlinds to change my desktop. Would a program like this be able to change the face of VideoLAN? I will go to the WinBlinds forum and ask there.

[CloudStalker]

Yup it should work as long as you use the default (wxWidgets) interface. I'm using Windows Blinds and and VLC 0.9.0 with the default QT4 interface. If anyone's interested the skins are:

Nov '06 Desktop by ~nextmario
pico tea 1.003

Resulting VLC look:

[dntknwhw2b]

Thanks,
I use the Thunderstorm theme. I modified it by making the desktop background black. I would like to make VideoLAN match that theme. One of these days when I learn more about how to use Win/Blinds. Then, I will make a really good theme.


I use ieSpell it's free, it's great!

[CloudStalker]

Once you change the Windows Blind skin it should apply the same skin settings to VLC without any problems. Are you sure it's set to wxWidgets?

I use Firefox's built-in spell checker and... well... read my signature.

[Clepto]

Ultimately its free and a great app. I do not like the difficult things that come with FREE stuff either but I still have the intellect to realize that I DID NOT PAY A DIME FOR IT! wow, it amazes me that people have the attitude to completely ignore the good work of others and the fact that they are willing to share their stuff with us for free.
Thanks guys at VideoLAN and if you fix the problem with the SKIN issue Thanks as well. I am definitely grateful for the fact that I do not have to use Windows Media Player!