This kind of project always lacks better UI/UX. I wonder if there is a way to bring more UI/UX people to Open-Source projects.
Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
381–390 of 576 posts
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#382Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it’s just simple things, like allowing an override of a status field. Or using a status field to check something is ok or not, instead of always checking the data itself. People make wrong assumptions, and requirements change. Don’t make it all rigid that you always need to implement every case
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?
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
This card is played too often by developers who only want to work on features they personally find interesting or worthwhile. Yes, you realistically cannot implement everything every user wants, but at the same time your software is meant to solve problems. Keeping direct communication with your users, and understanding what they find useful or not, should be the driving force of the design and features of your app.…
> developers who only want to work on features they personally find interesting or worthwhile. you say that like it's a bad or even a surprising thing. for a lot of people that's the entire point of open source development - in their day jobs they do what they are required to do for the company that pays them, and then in their own open source projects they can do what genuinely interests them.
Why bother releasing OSS at all then? What do developers who don't want to listen to their users honestly gain from this? Padding on their résumé?
If you just wish to solve your own problems, build things for yourself and keep it private. If, on the other hand, you want to help others and make your software public, then do right by the people who decided to try your software and listen to what they have to say.
How anyone can defend the attitude of the VLC developer in the thread linked above is beyond me.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#385I 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
VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it. It doesn't let the audio clip/exceed safe volumes and always applies some sort of a limiter, even if it's disabled everywhere in the settings. Try using an EQ on a bass-heavy track and see that it's limited. Try jumping back multiple times in a song at its beginning, and it will play in lower pitch.
I guess I don't want my video player to let audio exceed safe volumes...
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#386If you're on Linux, don't forget to enable hardware acceleration by adding hwdec=auto to mpv.conf. Works with AMD/Intel/NVIDIA. https://interfacinglinux.com/2024/01/10/hardware-acceleratio...
Not sure why but I've had lots of issues with worse performance (lagging/stuttering) on Fedora (I think kernel 6.10) with a Vega 64. Every year or so I'll give it a try and it just won't work well and I give up again.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
You speak as if VLC is the pinnacle of video player technology. I know it is an open source darling, but it's been a buggy, overengineered mess since forever, which is why many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It is the only player to stutter for me on Windows, to get lost in its settings page, to have a te…
VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are V…
> without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.
What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time
And 99.99% of the time you don't play "everything, with scratches", so UX issues are much more consequential than that
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
This card is played too often by developers who only want to work on features they personally find interesting or worthwhile. Yes, you realistically cannot implement everything every user wants, but at the same time your software is meant to solve problems. Keeping direct communication with your users, and understanding what they find useful or not, should be the driving force of the design and features of your app.…
A FOSS project can be FOSS and refuse all other contributions. FOSS does not make any requirements towards how the creator/main contributor handles and treats users, submitted patches, and feature requests. So no, FOSS users have zero inherent right to request anything - until the creator allows for it. I agree that taking that kind of "closed" approach is not helpful.
> A FOSS project can be FOSS and refuse all other contributions.
It can, yes. There's nothing preventing it, except that it's a shitty way to work in the open, and you may as well make the project proprietary or source available. The maintainers might have their own vision of the project direction, and they may reject contributions, but refusing contributions outright is how forks are made. Nothing wrong with that either, but usually the projects that are more receptive and responsive to user feedback are the ones that users and developers gravitate towards.
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think technically he’s correct (I haven’t worked on media decoding code, but I understand how common video encoding formats work). If you have a long video with only a single key frame at the beginning then to step back you would need to, starting from the beginning of the video, decode every frame up to the previous frame you wanted to jump to in order to apply frame deltas, also assuming you have some sort of fra…
all that's correct, but it's besides the point since other players are able to do this .
As outlined in some other thread, mpv is not able to stream eg to ChromeCast, unlike VLC. Maybe VLC supports certain things that make the previous-frame thing harder. I suspect it is so, but I don't have insight into the detailed architecture of VLC, unlike I assume the VLC developers. Do you?
Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player
#390It sounds stupid but the killer feature for me is possibility to have multiple subtitles visible, all easily configurable with a few keybinds (track, offset, position, size etc). No streaming service provides this, and they actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.
> actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that. This may also be due to legal issues / restrictions in the contract they had with that content's right holders or subtitles providers.
They probably don't want to license them globally, because the expected usage is low. But surely this could be taken into account in the contract / negotiation. Anyway I guess I'm just not in the target audience. But that's what MPV is great for, it allows you to tweak it for that 0.1% use-case.