I love VLC's engine, but have never been a fan of its UI, especially the configuration interface. How well separated are the UI and engine? Building a new UI for VLC seems like a fun project.
You might want to check out VLC for Windows Store. We're trying new UI and user experiences and will release soon an update on Windows 10 with an improved design (cleaner and faster).
I tried it on my tablet (an HP Stream 7) running Windows 8.1, hoping to use it to play the music from my iTunes library (by copying the Music folder in iTunes’ iTunes Media folder from the computer that I use iTunes on to a microSD card inserted in the tablet’s microSD card slot).
Unfortunately, it had a number of issues:
Issue #1:
It seems that VLC doesn’t like the directory structure iTunes uses to store your music (when you’ve checkmarked the option in iTunes to 'Keep iTunes Media folder organized'), which consists of the top level (the 'Music' folder) containing folders named after each artist, which in turn contain folders named after the albums of each respective artist, which in turn contain the actual music files for those albums.
The reason I believe VLC doesn’t like this way of having the music organized is because after letting VLC read this music folder, VLC showed the albums in a completely non-sensical way (it was showing duplicate entries for the same album, with tracks in those albums being split between the duplicates (despite the music files containing ID3 tags!)).
Issue #2:
There’s no way to tell VLC not to search for information on the tracks from the Internet. It shows some of my songs with erroneous album art, etc. My songs that come from actual albums already have the album art embedded, so I don’t need VLC applying completely irrelevant album art to songs that aren’t actually from an album!
Issue #3:
It’s extremely slow (on my HP Stream 7)!
――――――
I ended up switching over to MediaMonkey on the Windows Store, and while it has a host of issues of its own (it doesn’t show notifications for songs with album art, the UI gets glitchy after using it for a while (stuff like not showing text in the app anymore, so you can’t see your track names… which can only be rectified by closing and reopening it), etc.), at least it actually shows the contents on my Music folder perfectly organized (no duplicates or other such issues), it doesn’t try searching for metadata on the Internet, and it’s actually fast.