The team that powers VLC (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#41

Post by GhettoComputers » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #39

GhettoComputers wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to change the speed in VLC, I can find the menu easily. There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for. Its minimalist for no good reason, has poor accessibility, and if I can't even find the help menu,…

> There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for. It is true that mpv usually doesn't have a GUI menu for this (I believe it does on MacOS, but lets ignore that.) However it's not true that doing so requires using…

>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line.

Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player.

>It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software must aspire to be good for everybody.

Its minimalist enough to not have a help menu or list of commands, where is the manual for it even? Even in shells I can type man. What is the benefit of not having a right click menu or something like F1 not bringing up help. I am not against learning how to use tools, but who do you recommend this player to? People who want to memorize keys for their media player? Is that not like a CLI user?

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#42

Post by random_cynic » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:53 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #31

aktuel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much prefer mpv.

I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.

Like how? What can it do that vlc can't?

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#43

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

Eelongate wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for. It is true that mpv usually doesn't have a GUI menu for this (I believe it does on MacOS, but lets ignore that.) However it's not true that doing so requires using…

>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. >It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software…

> Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player.

It's very much like learning to play a piano by the same twisted logic.

> where is the manual for it even?

Here: https://mpv.io/manual/ Linked from straight from the mpv homepage. Also linked from the github page. You can also read it here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/mpv.r... Or you can read the local manpage on your computer using the manpage reader of your choice (I prefer KHelpCenter, but you can use `man` if you like that more...) If you have trouble finding the manpage, then you've definitely taken a wrong turn somewhere and should

> What is the benefit of not having a right click menu

The mpv psuedo-gui is drawn using the libass subtitle rendering library. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It's cross platform, so the same psuedo-gui code works the same on every platform (unlike the MacOS specific menu code.) It can be modified, extended, replaced or supplemented using Lua or JS user-scripts using the same libass techniques (the psuedo-gui mpv ships with is implemented as a builtin Lua script.) The biggest downsides to this are being limited to doing things subtitles can do (which doesn't include right-click menus) and the fundamental weirdness of using a subtitle library to render a GUI in the first place (personally I think it's endearing, but I acknowledge that it's weird.)

> People who want to memorize keys for their media player? Is that not like a CLI user?

No? Shortcut-focused GUIs and command line interfaces are not the same thing. Incidentally, mpv does have a embedded REPL if you do want to control it using a commandline interface. You can access it by pressing `. It is useful in some scenarios but you'll soon find it's a hell of a lot more convenient to use keyboard shortcuts instead. I virtually never use it except for testing when I'm writing mpv user-scripts.

> but who do you recommend this player to?

Only to people who are able and eager to hack on their media player. Suppose you want to control your media player from another application; vlc can support this with the telnet interface, but it's very limited and poorly documented. mpv's IPC interface is extremely powerful and well documented.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#44

Post by GhettoComputers » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #43

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. >It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software…

> Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. It's very much like learning to play a piano by the same twisted logic. > where is the manual for it even? Here: https://mpv.io/manual/ Linked from straight from the mpv homepage. Also linked from the github page. You can also read it here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/mpv.r... Or you can read the…

I asked not because I can't google them, but to open it from the player, is that at all possible or do I have to go online to the homepage, github, and open my terminal to find out how to change settings in MPV?

>There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It's cross platform, so the same psuedo-gui code works the same on every platform

I can't find it on iOS anyway but VLC is there, I don't know the benefit of having the same UI on mobile and desktop so its probably lost on me. Having a manual in the program or it bringing up a text file in the program can't be that against MPV sensibilities can it?

>No? Shortcut-focused GUIs and command line interfaces are not the same thing.

I agree, I can use shortcuts on VLC as well, but it has a GUI and help file, but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files.

>Suppose you want to control your media player from another application

I can control through d-bus and control VLC with SSH with ncurses. https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Modules/ncurses/

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#45

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

Eelongate wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for. It is true that mpv usually doesn't have a GUI menu for this (I believe it does on MacOS, but lets ignore that.) However it's not true that doing so requires using…

>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. >It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software…

CLI and keyboard-driven are not the same thing.

Manual is the same as everything else on the system; `man mpv`.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#46

Post by random_cynic » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #43

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. >It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software…

> Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player. It's very much like learning to play a piano by the same twisted logic. > where is the manual for it even? Here: https://mpv.io/manual/ Linked from straight from the mpv homepage. Also linked from the github page. You can also read it here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/mpv.r... Or you can read the…

> https://mpv.io/manual/ Linked from straight from the mpv homepage

That's just the manpage in html format, are you kidding? We're not in the era of text terminals, there are so many tools for writing good documentation that this is just inexcusable. Take a look at VLC documentation (https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/), that's a proper documentation with screenshots that looks like someone actually put some effort into writing that so that it is understandable to new users instead of plugging words into a troff file.

Except for the edge case of controlling a media player from another application you've put no convincing use case for using mpv over vlc. So it's a personal preference not that mpv is superior to vlc in anyway (actually far inferior for most use cases).

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#47

Post by 8bitsrule » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

TIL: before you click on 'View>Minimal interface', be sure to note the shortcut you need to restore it. Because minimal means minimal.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#48

Post by Zircom » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:30 AM UTC

zppln wrote: post #18

kdjfjf7d7 wrote: post #3

I always wonder why people go gaga googoo over VLC, when there's Media Player Classic with K-lite which does a lot of the same things better. I remember watching 1080p blurry rips in MPC without any problems in 2008 while VLC would spend 1 year doing some sort of buffering upon opening then struggling to play the video correctly.

Well, I've personally always wondered why people advocate MPC. During like 15+ years of use I can't recall having a single issue with VLC. And that's from consuming basically everything from the VCD era and onwards. In my experience VLC has been as close to flawless software as one can get.

It is[1] popular to recommend MPC over VLC in the anime fansub community, especially on /a/. When H. 264/10bit was newish and had just started to come into regular use in the scene[2], I distinctly remember a lot of people shitting on VLC because at the time it didn't handle it very well right out of the box, and there were tons of guides floating around on how to download/setup MPC-HC with CCCP or k-lite and haali media splitter for a supposedly better viewing experience.

[1] Or at least was, my recollections regarding this are nearly 10-15 years old at this point.

[2] There was one specific person, Daiz from the Underwater/UTW fansub group, that was one of the first people to start encoding his releases in H.264/10bit, and he would get a lot of hate because they tended not to play very well on improper setups, vanilla VLC being among those. "Dammit Daiz", they would say. He eventually bruteforced a tripcode to have H.264 in it just to mess back at them for all the hate. Fun memories.

edit: here we go, a contemporary HN rant from the man himself regarding MPC vs VLC. Looks like summoning Daiz works here too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449420

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#49

Post by NicoJuicy » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #11

> “There are some [silly] features in VLC—some filters that everyone finds weird and asks [us], ‘Why do you have that?’ The answer is someone sent a good patch, so there was no reason to refuse it,” says Kempf.

A "not so silly" option is that you can just cast any video to a Chromecast.

Which is quite handy for videos that don't belong in eg. Plex.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#50

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

random_cynic wrote: post #42

Eelongate wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.

Like how? What can it do that vlc can't?

It has the JSON-IPC interface, which is much better than vlc's telnet interface (which is barely documented at all.) The pseudo-gui is written as a lua script and can be swapped out with your own to suit your personal whims. It comes with builtin support for youtube-dl/yt-dlp (which work on a wider range of sites than vlc's equivalent feature), which can be modified to allow changing the format/quality on the fly. Relating to that, scripts can add new protocol support for things like torrent files, magnet links, etc. With the right scripts and configuration, you can turn it into a capable image viewer suitable for reading comic books (cbz files).

I have a gallery view (for the playlist) and a contact sheet view (for the current file) that both have thumbnails. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get this in VLC (surely there must be a way, right? But the documentation is crap and I can't find it anywhere in the menus or preferences window. All I can find is the playlist view that doesn't have thumbnails.)

But the big differences which enable everything else is better documentation, particularly for the scripting and IPC interfaces. If you can find the documentation for VLC's Lua interface please let me know, because as far as I can tell that documentation is nonexistent. It's certainly not in the manpage, nor the worthless F1 window, nor can I find it on the VLC wiki). It's difficult to figure out what VLC's Lua interface is even capable of, but if you go by the addons listed on VLC's website the sole advantage of VLC's Lua scripting seems to be the ability to create basic GUIs.