Desktop UI improvement requests

[tempelmann]

• It would be great if there was an option to have VLC remember the last played position so that it continues there when the app was (accidentally) quit or its window was closed and then reopened.
• Prev/Next buttons in the window: I liked it better in VLC v1 where clicking the << and >> buttons around the play/pause button did advance the currently played movie instead of moving up/down in the playlist.
  
  I never ever use the playlist for Videos (and I use iTunes, not VLC, for music), and therefore the v2's operation of these buttons is not only useless but harmful: It switches (accidentally) to another movie and when I then go back to what I was watching, it starts that movie again at the beginning (see my first point).
  
  It keeps annoying me a lot, so I keep deleting VLC 2 and using 1.1.2 instead again just because I can't get used to avoiding those buttons. But now, with the recently reported security issue in versions before 2.0.5, I feel I should not be using 1.1.2 any more, putting me in to a bind that I don't like at all.

Any chance these (mis)behaviors could be improved soon?

[mederi]

* VLC Extension script or VLC plugin for remembering last playback position:
viewtopic.php?f=29&t=106361#p360151
* VLC menu: Tools > Customize Interface...

[tempelmann]

mederi, thanks for the pointer to the extension. Now I've only got to figure out where to place lua extensions so that they won't get replaced when installing an update of VLC (on OSX)...

However, your pointer to the Interface customization isn't helpful. I had looked there before my post, and could not find anything related to configuring the prev/next buttons, but only for configuring key presses.

[tempelmann]

Oh my, there's so much misinformation around VLC for OSX...

Many suggest that lua extensions have to go here:

* Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/

(In fact, mederi, that appears from your own code, see here: http://addons.videolan.org/content/show ... ent=149688)

However, this is not a good place as such items would get overwritten when VLC gets updated.

Instead, they should be placed here:

~/Library/Application Support/org.videolan.vlc/lua/extensions

(The ~stands for the user's home directory, and the lua and extensions folders probably need to be created by hand)

Also, the mempos lua program has a few bugs. I'm in the progress of fixing them now.

[tempelmann]

While the extension, once manually activated, does write the current play time regularly, it needs to be re-activated for every newly opened file, it appears. I can't find any callbacks that would automate this, making this quite unusable for me.

I guess I'd have to dig into the C source code of VLC in order to figure out where to hook into... But with the lack of docs on all this I'm not eager to do that.

There's also the plugin, but that doesn't easily compile as it requires the VLC headers (and then it still may not compile on OSX, who knows?).

This is no fun. Therefore, I give up now. Thanks for trying to help, mederi, I saw you've had your troubles with this stuff as well.

[mederi]

Thank you for sharing your experience with VLC Extension Lua scripts on Mac OSX. I am user of OS Windows as you can see it in my status and have limited informations about other OSs. So far my knowledge about support of VLC Extensions on OSX is, that it works, but it does not support custom dialog box (Subtitler (lite), Sampler, Time). Can you confirm this for me, please?

As there is not anything better and working for me than "mempos.lua", I use it as a better solution than creating a custom bookmark and saving in playlist. I simply enable the "Remember position" right before I want/need to stop watching film and quit VLC. Next time I just open the same film in VLC and activate the extension to get to the last played position.

You are right, that there could be an option to start chosen extensions automatically when starting VLC.

[tempelmann]

@mederi, in general, Lua extensions work on OSX.

When I run your sampler on OSX (VLC 2.0.5), it crashes unless I remove the call to "create_dialog".

I wonder if I should look into extending the OSX UI directly, adding a new "recently played" list item, that includes remembering the last played position. I am afraid it'll be quite a pain to get it to compile as with most x-platform open source code... I may give it a try later.