The VideoLAN Forums

I use VLC as my interfered player on my mac, even over the improved iDVD.

The biggest nag about VLC is the lack of automation when playing disks. There is too many open options in the file menu (open file, quick open fie, open disk, open network)

When you "open a disk", there is also too many options, and on an OS X sys, we are not use to unix file names. eg "dvdnav:///dev/rdisk2" what the hell does that mean? There is also options like DVD, VCD, Audio CD, Use DVD Menus, Device Name, Title, Chapter etc. etc.

Should VLC not detect what disks are there and then detect what format it is in? Why does VLC not ask me if i want it to take over iDVD as the default DVD player? Can we hide some uncommon options and only have them appear when you click "more options" or "advanced" or something like that? Can vlc be integrated to use disk icons instead of text like the rest of the OS?

This is my biggest itch with vlc. It really would bring the player to the next level if this was attended to. Supported formats is 11/10 but ease of use and os x integration are 8/10. iDVD ranks 2/10 on formats and 9/10 on ease of use.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

Brendan

Yeah, CloudStalker always wished that when he pops an audio CD into the drive, while VLC is open, a pop-up message would appear: "Add audio CD to playlist?" <OK/Cancel>

That would make it really simple and nice.

VLC on Windows adds e.g. "Play DVD with VLC media player" to the registry so when a CD/DVD's autoplay is initialised that will be displayed as an autoplay option (not always though ). Also I'm pretty sure there is an equivlant for Audio CDs too . As far as I know this is not done for OS X?

The GUI has been designed to offer a high level of customisability to the played back stream etc. - generally the defaults should operate fine. It is understanable why the MRL string "dvd:///dev/rdisk2" might seem confusing however all that says is that the dvd:// input module (DVD with menus) is being used with the device "/dev/rdisk2" (where /dev/* is the name for a device on *nix). The buttons/text boxes etc. are used to generate the MRL, so for more standard operations the MRL string doesn't need to be customised by hand.

Arite.

Well, on mac, we should display the name of the device I guess...

I did kind of understand what it meant, as I am a programmer and have worked on unix systems, but if you show anything but the DVD icon, the same one that appears on the desktop, to my girlfriend, she won't know what to do, and wont want to. If she sees anything like that string, she would shut down the window.

She is really scared of --please stay polite-- the system up. Anything that looks like it could be messy she stays away from. You are right when you say the default setting should work fine. They always do. But she does not know what she is dong when she hits the "apply" or "open" or what ever the button says.

Even though I can figure out how to work a lot of this stuff, I really like when a computer can do the figuring for me. When I want to do something out of the ordinary, I don't mind hitting the advanced button to make it happen.

My 2 cents.

Brendan