Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything is a “simple thing” unless you’re the one implementing it. Things that seem simple on the surface rarely are, especially long-term.
I’d say it has to do with not willing to duplicate data. On paper forms, it is simple. Why can’t it be in a digital form?
Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
481–490 of 576 posts
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite remarkable that you call the developer toxic when those were his replies paraphrasing what users had said and demanded up-thread. > that is no way to talk about other volunteer developers that contribute their time. He is not dissing the other developers. He is one of those developers that had been called lazy and incompetent by the forum posters. For example (from the thread): > it's mostly an excuse to not im…
Yes ok, I did read the thread but didn't get the reference. I wouldn't say it's "quite remarkable", more simply that I misunderstood. My apologies. But I stand by the broader point that I do not think his attitude is at all constructive or helpful, and while I am sure he is fed of up what he views as entitled users this is not a productive way to handle it. The toxicity is that it casts shade on FOSS and pushes peopl…
> And VLC would be half what it is today without it's users. He would do well to remember that, too.
I disagree. It would be exactly the same as it is now without the users. The users have not contributed anything to the project. Popularity doesn't write code, it just creates communication overhead.
Again, this is not commercial software. Commercial software needs popularity. For FOSS projects, popularity is cool and can be an ego-boost for the maintainers, even open some doors and get some funding, but it's not the point of thing (and never covers costs anyway). The point is to write some good code that scratches some itch the maintainers have.
That whole point of view from the users, of "you owe us because your thing is popular now" is toxic entitlement. If you didn't contribute to the project, you didn't affect it, and you're owed nothing, absolutely nothing, by the maintainers. Everyone would do well to remember that.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this. It seems you got that I misunderstood. I've clarified my point in another reply. Also agree that if this is a question that keeps coming up a much better response would be to simply explain your reasoning once in an FAQ that carefully presents the argument and point all future discussions to that entry. Done. To the average user, it's not at all obvious why reverse play is so much harder than it look…
The QuickTime API supported reverse play around 1993 or so, when I enjoyed using it for "back and forth" animated sprites, and playing music videos backwards to reveal the satanic messages with demonic backmasking. Reverse / Backwards Moonwalk - Michael Jackson - Better Than The Original!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT_Aq2FjJo0 Here's the documentation and code I wrote when working at Kaleida Labs (a joint vent…
The whole point that Remi was making is that doing this for one format is probably easy. Doing this for all formats in a consistent manner with a consistent experience is not easy, verging on impossible. Other players only support a limited set of formats, so can do this easily. VLC supports everything, so therefore has to handle all the bizarre quirks that make this a very difficult task.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#484I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627
Wow, reading this now very old discussion makes me cringe a little bit when I see dingers like these:
> If you think it is easy, VLC is open-source: you are welcome to provide the easy patch. Somehow, I won't be holding my breath.
> If it's so easy, why are you not doing it? Talk is cheap.
> I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers.
> And I don't take moral lesson from an hypocrit who feels like they can demand work from "toxic" volunteers and even state that they are not there to do any actual work.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A playback architecture that can wrangle all of that cruelty into a consistent experience was hard won. No, it hasn't. The only reason I use mpv instead of VLC is because of the frame step feature. Everyone else has proven that it is possible and practical to do. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If people don't use your product, it doesn't matter how right and pure of vision you are.
I'll admit I can't weigh on whether there's a plausible strategy for implementing backwards frame step in VLC without violating any of their sacred invariants. Maybe the existence of other players with that feature implies that the VLC devs just aren't seeing it. But without that knowledge, I'm left to trust the developer's presumably deep knowledge of their own architecture when they say that it just doesn't 'fit'.…
> VLC isn't a business
I assume this means you can hire lead devs to fix bugs and add features.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
So can mplayer and did that way before mpv could.
mplayer was forked into mplayer2, which in turn was forked into mpv Though AFAIK, most of the rendering code behind mpv has been entirely rewritten.
What was the cause of the fork? An unresolvable internal debate? I am curious to know more about the history.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree! VLC is what it is today because the authors understood video standards enough to make the _right_ abstractions that could generalize to ~every video format ever. That is no easy task. Video container standards are utterly perverse, and seem to delight in stomping over even the most innocent intuitions about what you would expect to find in a stream of bits that purports to contain "video". They often refuse…
> VLC is what it is today VLC is the least common denominator of video players. Its UI is asinine and the two primary reasons for its popularity are its iconic logo and multi-OS compatibility. I admit you're probably right on the topic of stepping backwards by one frame, but I wouldn't be so quick to shower VLC with broad praise like that.
> Its UI is asinine
What is it about end-user software with a GUI that seems to trigger such heated, emotional responses on HN? Each time that I read discussions like these, everyone and there uncle pops into the conversation to add the "one thing" they don't like about it. Or "I'll never use it again after that UI bug from 2004." It is exhausting. One thing that I have learned over the years: Never ask a dev their opinion about a UI. Or, if you do, make sure to ignore whatever they say. It is mostly complaining about "hang-nails".
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree! VLC is what it is today because the authors understood video standards enough to make the _right_ abstractions that could generalize to ~every video format ever. That is no easy task. Video container standards are utterly perverse, and seem to delight in stomping over even the most innocent intuitions about what you would expect to find in a stream of bits that purports to contain "video". They often refuse…
> VLC is what it is today because the authors understood video standards enough to make the _right_ abstractions that could generalize to ~every video format ever. VLC used to be the dominant video player for this reason, but then everything has crystallized around h.264 (and h.265) which made the breadth of codec support not as important anymore, making VLC slowly losing relevance because they aren't focused on user…
> slowly losing relevance
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Locales are so much more than character sets. E.g. an Arabic locale changes the direction of writing, it also changes the characters used for numbers, and completely changes the way numbers and dates are formatted. This is where the C locale functions are problematic. Character encoding is the easy and safe part.
Locales are much more than character sets, but the question was about character sets. Also for most of those things, you want to be explicit about when to use the locale and when to not.
> Also for most of those things, you want to be explicit about when to use the locale and when to not.
Right. And that's where the POSIX C API falls down. The locale isn't named explicitly. Its not a function parameter. Its specified via a global variable that gets shared between all your threads.
You might think you can use scanf to parse a string in a JSON file. It might appear to work fine on your local computer. But scanf behaves differently depending on the system locale. You can wrap scanf with a helper function which sets the locale to something sensible, calls scanf, and restores the locale. But because the locale is shared with other threads, which might be depending on the locale in other ways. So this can introduce race conditions.
The whole thing is horribly designed - and it leads to buggy, unreliable code that is hard to reason about. Even in the best case, introducing thread syncronization into a function like sscanf will lead to a dramatic decrease in performance.
Its horrible. Just horrible.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
> VLC is what it is today because the authors understood video standards enough to make the _right_ abstractions that could generalize to ~every video format ever. VLC used to be the dominant video player for this reason, but then everything has crystallized around h.264 (and h.265) which made the breadth of codec support not as important anymore, making VLC slowly losing relevance because they aren't focused on user…
> slowly losing relevance I love this type of editorializing language. Ok, if VLC is "slowly losing relevance" (a claim for which you provide no evidence), what player is "slowly gaining relevance"?
Everything that is provided by default by the OS.
Installing VLC used to be one of the first things people did on a new computer, including many non tech-savy people, along with a web browser that isn't IE/Edge.
Now the fraction who bother installing it is much smaller. The default video player is good enough for most usage (overall usage has declined anyway because of streaming).