Trouble with skins

[Altay]

I think the reason everyone is having trouble with skins is that on the main skin page there is nothing that says you need to choose Settings > Switch Interface > Skins 2, then right-click the new interface and choose the skin you want to use from the list. I ended up having to search through this forum to figure this out. I like VLC Player, but skins are definately a hassle. None of the skins I found would maximize when I double clicked the titlebar and they didn't have a maximize button either. Is there a reason you can't make it Settings > Switch Interface then choose the interface you want from that list?


By the way, I noticed that VLC Player was only able to play the audio of some mov files I have. Actually, on second thought, there is no audio for the movies. But VLC treats the movies like they're audio files. Is VLC only compatable with certain mov files? Quicktime is able to play them properly.

[funman]

There is no need to do this way,

you can just launch vlc with the "-I skins2" argument, which can be done easily on windows with the start menu shortcut.

For the .mov, could you provide samples on ftp://streams.videolan.org/incoming ?

[ipkiss]

I think the reason everyone is having trouble with skins is that on the main skin page there is nothing that says you need to choose Settings > Switch Interface > Skins 2, then right-click the new interface and choose the skin you want to use from the list.

This is not the case: if you really start VLC as indicated ("vlc -I skins2" on linux, or useing the "VLC (skins)" shortcut), you don't have to change the interface. So you can directly use skins. However it's true that the explanation is not so clear, in particular for Windows, and we should improve it.

None of the skins I found would maximize when I double clicked the titlebar and they didn't have a maximize button either.

The skins2 engine doesn't allow maximizing a skin, and actually i don't really see the point of such a feature. Even if you want your visualization window to be as big as possible, you can double-click on the video to make it go fullscreen. But i guess it could be added rather easily if people require it.

Is there a reason you can't make it Settings > Switch Interface then choose the interface you want from that list?

There is a technical reason, yes. The normal interface and the skins2 interface cannot work at the same time, so it's very hard to make them communicate (i.e. the skins2 interface has to give the list of skins to the normal interface so that it can propose the list, and when an item is chosen it has to go back to the skins2 interface, etc... It's even worse if we want to have a skins selector showing thumbnails of the skins, or allowing to change the skin on the fly).
Changing this requires a lot of work and time, which we unfortunately lack...

By the way, I noticed that VLC Player was only able to play the audio of some mov files I have. Actually, on second thought, there is no audio for the movies. But VLC treats the movies like they're audio files. Is VLC only compatable with certain mov files? Quicktime is able to play them properly.

The codec is probably not recognized. Do you have error messages in the "View --> Messages" window?
BTW, you should probably ask this question in another forum, because I don't think that all the competent persons read the skins forum...