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mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

mpv.io

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Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#31

Post by stephengillie »

ciupicri wrote: post #29
SimHacker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness, but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.

What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.

The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#32

Post by oijaf888 »

stephengillie wrote: post #24

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .m…

Are all the codecs that VLC ships with freely redistributable? I was under the impression that many required licensing agreements even to distribute for free which impedes open source projects without a corporate backing from doing so.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#33

Post by stephengillie »

oijaf888 wrote: post #32
stephengillie wrote: post #24

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .m…

Are all the codecs that VLC ships with freely redistributable? I was under the impression that many required licensing agreements even to distribute for free which impedes open source projects without a corporate backing from doing so.

AFAIK, they're not, which is one of the reasons that newer versions of VLC have problems playing videos which play fine on older versions -- because the license-requiring codecs have been removed, and only sometimes replaced by free codecs or workarounds.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#34

Post by pwenzel »

With all the talk of VLC for media playback...

I use mplayer almost daily for no-frills internet radio listening. I have my terminal window open all day anyway, so no need to waste resources (screen real-estate or otherwise) on iTunes or VLC.

For example, Groove Salad's AAC stream:

mplayer -playlist http://somafm.com/groovesalad130.pls

Seeing a focus on OSX improvements in mpv, I am hoping we'll see it installable via homebrew some day soon.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#35

Post by pgz »

pwenzel wrote: post #34

With all the talk of VLC for media playback... I use mplayer almost daily for no-frills internet radio listening. I have my terminal window open all day anyway, so no need to waste resources (screen real-estate or otherwise) on iTunes or VLC. For example, Groove Salad's AAC stream: mplayer -playlist http://somafm.com/groovesalad130.pls Seeing a focus on OSX improvements in mpv, I am hoping we'll see it installable vi…

It is installable via homebrew very easily: https://github.com/mpv-player/homebrew-mpv

The formula also builds `mpv.app`, I use that to open files directly from the Finder.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#36

Post by Semaphor »

I remember when I had to use MPlayer as it was the only video player with dual core support (some special build) and as my graphic cards are always rather old that was the only way for me to watch 720p videos :)

Some general comments about comments here:

Never checked back on VLC, back when I tried it 4-5 years ago it was terribly buggy and crashed all the time.

Codec Packs are a thing of the past for me ever since I discovered CCCP [1] many years ago

MPC-HC [2] or SPlayer [3] (back when it was released there were some GPL violations,open sourced afterwards [4]) are my go-to players. MPC with CCCP plays everything, SPlayer is extremely simple while maintaining top quality.

[1] http://www.cccp-project.net/

[2] http://mpc-hc.org/

[3] http://www.splayer.org/index.en.html (down, cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spl...)

[4] https://code.google.com/p/shooter-player/

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#37

Post by SimHacker »

stephengillie wrote: post #30
SimHacker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness, but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.

Uh...what? The UI is plain, but all of the controls I regularly need are there. And I ABSOLUTELY LOVE that every hotkey is rebindable. If you don't like "change subtitles" to be V, you can change it to be P or even Alt-V. (Why can't we rebind Windows Copy to be Alt-W instead of Ctrl-C?) And last I checked, the UI can be skinned too, but I grew up with plain interfaces.

So why does it have one set of controls in window mode, and a totally different set of controls in full screen mode? Who decided that?

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#38

Post by w1ntermute »

stephengillie wrote: post #24

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .m…

> And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware. All the codecs are included with the program.

You're absolutely right to tag that as FUD, because I have never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" in order to get videos to play in MPlayer on Linux (I don't know how it is on Windows).

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#39

Post by SimHacker »

stephengillie wrote: post #31
ciupicri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.

The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.

Some but not all of the changes I make to the configuration (like key bindings in particular) don't take effect until I restart VLC. What the fuck???

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-...

"In VLC, as of 1.1.11, you have to go to interface, preferences, hotkeys, and doubleclick the GLOBAL hotkey you need to set. Press the media key on the keyboard, and it'll return but will act like nothing changed. Click "Apply" and it should show you the media key identification of the key you pressed. Once you have setup all your keys, save, and completely exit and restart VLC."

For me, on both Mac and Windows, VLC key bindings fail to take effect until I restart it (any key bindings, not just global media hotkeys), and many options simply don't get saved at all. I have to hand edit the configuration text file. Ridiculous.

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154

"Saving can fail. And sometimes it can even output corrupted file."

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340

"As for saving, make sure you click 'Save' on the options dialog. OK applies them without saving, while Save applies and saves them."

Yes I am pressing the "Save" button. There is no "OK" button, and if there was both an OK and a Save button, that would still be a terrible user interface design.

Basic simple things like that just don't work. Maybe my preferences file keeps getting corrupted, but that should NOT happen, ever. At least it should give me an error message instead of just silently losing. Shameful.

Then there's the way it decides to resize the playlist window really big for no reason at all. Why can't the playlist window just stay the same size?

It crashes all the time, and then when I restart it, it ALWAYS asks if I want to report the last crash to the development team. No I don't, and I also don't want it to ask me that every fucking time. I just want it to shut the fuck up and play a video. Of course there is no option I can find to turn off that annoying modal pop-up dialog. A not-terribly-designed user interface would have a checkbox on the annoying modal dialog that says "Never ask me this ever again", and I wouldn't have to go through an unsuccessful wild goose chase through the millions of advanced options searching for a way to turn that dialog off.

The simple preference user interface has checkbox options to disable video and audio. What's the point of that? In fact, those are the first options in the video and audio sections! Who would ever want to disable video or audio in a video player? You already have a volume and mute control, and you can disable video and audio tracks from the menus. So why is that the first option in the simple preferences user interface? Was there a huge demand from novice users for that option? Terrible user interface design.

There are many other things about the UI design that are extremely annoying, a lot having to do with the out of control feature creep and totally uncoordinated committee design. All those advanced options, yet there is no way to set it to always show advanced options every time. Isn't it ironic that it has millions of options, but no option to always show the millions of options by default? Or maybe it's just failing to save the "advanced mode" option. So lame.

It gives me the distinct impression that nobody on the development team gives a shit.

Re: mpv - a free and open-source general-purpose video player

#40

Post by pkj »

w1ntermute wrote: post #38
stephengillie wrote: post #24

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .m…

> And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware. All the codecs are included with the program. You're absolutely right to tag that as FUD, because I have never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" in order to get videos to play in MPlayer on Linux (I do…

>never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs"

Second that. I have had videos which couldn't be played on VLC (codecs or missing frames) play nicely with mplayer. Easily the best versatile player, especially if you are conversant with the command line options ( or take a quick look at man page).

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