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

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#51

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

random_cynic wrote: post #46

Eelongate wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Take a look at VLC documentation (https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/)

Trust me, I have. Extensively. The mpv manpage (which is actually written in the reStructuredText markup lanugage) is comprehensive and easy to read. Era of text terminals? Give me a break, I just gave you a link for reading it in your browser, just like the VLC wiki, except the mpv manual is very comprehensive and up to date, while the VLC manual is scattered, sparse, and frequently out of date. I practice terminal emulator avoidance; I don't edit text in a terminal emulator, I don't read manpages in a terminal emulator, and I almost never start mpv from a terminal emulator either.

> So it's a personal preference not that mpv is superior to vlc [...] most use cases [...]

I have been upfront about that. I recommend VLC to the vast majority of users, including all of my family and most of my friends.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#52

Post by johnvaluk » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

boiler_up800 wrote: post #19

johnvaluk wrote: post #13

After several false starts, I finally figured out how to configure the DLNA server in my router to serve files from USB-attached storage to the smart TVs on my LAN. Then I installed the VLC app on my iPhone and it discovered the DLNA server immediately as a UPnP File Server in the Network tab. It works pretty well, except it doesn't show the cover art for music files. The MacOS app also discovers the server, but the…

Any particular links that were helpful for this?

Honestly, no. The whole process felt like a scavenger hunt. In theory, it should be simple: 1) Connect a drive containing media to a USB port. 2) Enable DLNA server. 3) Select the server in a DLNA client and play the media. It sounds like something that should be a standard feature in any smart TV or networked media device. It's surprising how many bugs and bad interfaces I encountered along the way.

Once I got it working, I liked the built-in DLNA media server in my particular ASUS router enough that I retired my Jellyfin server.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#53

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #44

Eelongate wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

> but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files.

I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage.

> I can control through d-bus

Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capable than an old IR remote control. If my VLC lua scripts can send arbitrary messages across that interface, I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere.

> ncurses

I've controlled ncurses interfaces before using Tcl/Expect. It's a world of hurt. Besides, I thought you hated terminal emulators (frankly, I do...)

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#54

Post by kdjfjf7d7 » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #38

kdjfjf7d7 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think VLC is bad by any means or that anyone shouldn't use it, I just don't understand the comments I often see on HN acting like it's some unprecedented software that's unlike anything else.

VLC is unique in its support for every codec under the sun. If it refuses to play a video file, it's probably because it's damaged beyond recovery, or not a video file at all. The default Windows and smartphone video players choke on all kinds of files, so you can't really expect that any given file is supported.

MPC with K-lite can play anything and has done it before VLC, calling it unique for that reason alone is a stretch.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#55

Post by GhettoComputers » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #53

GhettoComputers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files. I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage. > I can control through d-bus Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capa…

>I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage.

Can I open help from the program's GUI? Is it done on purpose to make it hard to learn from the application, and if not, what practical use is it?

>Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capable than an old IR remote control.

>I've controlled ncurses interfaces before using Tcl/Expect. It's a world of hurt. Besides, I thought you hated terminal emulators (frankly, I do...)

What problems does that have? What arbitrary commands do you have? I have a BT keyboard I can use too, so I don't even use app remote control, just saying that you can if you wanted to. Maybe I don't appreciate it because I don't know about how to use it properly, what does it do that VLC can't?

I don't hate CLI, I hate having a GUI that is more complex than a GUI for playing videos. I can map CLI controls to a GUI on my phone, I don't like how MPV is like a a CLI because it has poor accessibility as a feature, is there a practical reason to not have F1 invoke the shortcuts or it can't display them without an external application?

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#56

Post by csmcg » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 3:32 AM UTC

8bitsrule wrote: post #47

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

You can right-click anywhere in the VLC window to bring up the context menu, which has a 'View' tab which let's you toggle it back.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#57

Post by colordrops » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 3:40 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?

loads instantaneously, simple config, fully-keyboard driven, vim-like bindings, great to use from the command line or terminal-based file managers like ranger.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#58

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 3:47 AM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #55

Eelongate wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files. I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage. > I can control through d-bus Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capa…

>I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage. Can I open help from the program's GUI? Is it done on purpose to make it hard to learn from the application, and if not, what practical use is it? >Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe…

I guess the F1 screen is really important to you, but I'm looking at VLC's F1 screen right now and it looks worthless to me. It's just some links to online materials. Could mpv have that? In principle, yes. Is it worth the development effort and technical debt? I doubt it. If you're the sort of user who balks at this, it will be the least of your worries anyway and you should almost certainly use VLC instead. I think VLC is a very good program (albeit with very poor documentation) and I recommend VLC to almost everybody who asks me for a recommendation. The reason VLC's poor documentation doesn't stop me from recommending VLC is because I think most users will never need to consult the documentation in the first place.

But, if somebody is the sort of user who might find themselves wanting to consult the VLC documentation, say because they are trying to write their own extension to VLC, recommending mpv instead is a no brainer for me. mpv doesn't give you an F1 window with a clickable URL to the manual, but anybody who's capable and inclined to write scripts to extend their video editor will not be hung up by such a minor omission. And when they do manage to land on the documentation for either editor, mpv's documentation has a much better chance of actually having the information they're looking for.

> What problems does that have? What arbitrary commands do you have?

Concrete example: I control mpv from a media library application on my desktop. I can load a playlist of files from that media library into mpv. When mpv starts playing the next file, it can send a message to the media library notifying it of this. VLC can do all of that too; so far so good. In addition to playing the playlist, from within mpv I can also select files (without playing them), tag them, or delete them. When my mpv scripts do these things, they send events to the library application over the same interface that the library application is using to control mpv. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no VLC equivalent so I would need to open another communication channel between the two (instead of doing this, I decided to drop VLC support entirely.)

> I don't hate CLI, I hate having a GUI that is more complex than a GUI for playing videos

I'm starting to think we're having a fundamental communication breakdown here, because this seems completely backwards to me. VLC is the one with a complex GUI, not mpv. mpv has a very simple GUI; too simple to a fault [from the perspective of most users, who are better served by VLC.] If your needs are solely to play a file, just drag and drop the file into mpv and it will play just fine. It only gets more unfriendly when you want to change parameters and configuration, which VLC has very complicated GUIs for while mpv does not.

> Is there a practical reason to not have F1 invoke the shortcuts

In principle it could display shortcuts in the psuedo-GUI. Displaying the shortcuts in another window or in another application would require platform-specific code to be maintained for this, and I'm guessing that none of the mpv developers think that is worth their effort.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#59

Post by random_cynic » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #51

random_cynic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Take a look at VLC documentation ( https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/ ) Trust me, I have. Extensively . The mpv manpage (which is actually written in the reStructuredText markup lanugage) is comprehensive and easy to read. Era of text terminals? Give me a break, I just gave you a link for reading it in your browser, just like the VLC wiki, except the mpv manual is very comprehensive and up to date,…

You completely missed the point about man pages. It doesn't matter what the man page was written in, it's still a man page, optimized for viewing in text terminal. It makes no sense to use this format for web browser. Vlc also had a man page, but the developers know the difference between a man page and proper documentation. It's completely unsuitable for new users using any sufficiently complex application like a video player.

Re: The team that powers VLC (2019)

#60

Post by Eelongate » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

random_cynic wrote: post #59

Eelongate wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take a look at VLC documentation ( https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/ ) Trust me, I have. Extensively . The mpv manpage (which is actually written in the reStructuredText markup lanugage) is comprehensive and easy to read. Era of text terminals? Give me a break, I just gave you a link for reading it in your browser, just like the VLC wiki, except the mpv manual is very comprehensive and up to date,…

You completely missed the point about man pages. It doesn't matter what the man page was written in, it's still a man page, optimized for viewing in text terminal. It makes no sense to use this format for web browser. Vlc also had a man page, but the developers know the difference between a man page and proper documentation. It's completely unsuitable for new users using any sufficiently complex application like a vi…

What it was "optimized for" is irrelevant if it's legible and has good information. The mpv manual read in a web browser is both of those. The VLC manual is a mediawiki (if we're talking about subjective appearances, mediawiki has always been fugly) that's both sparse and out of date. Changes to mpv make it into the manual because they're both in the same repo and people making changes to the code are expected by community convention to have the corresponding updates to the manual in their pull request. This doesn't happen with VLC.

The only upside of the VLC manual is that only one in a thousand VLC users will ever need to look at it in the first place. mpv's manual is necessary but high quality, while VLC's manual is low quality but extraneous.