"I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers."- Rémi Denis-Courmont
I see Rémi Denis-Courmont's arrogant attitude and disrespect for users and developers hasn't improved in all these years. And neither has VLC's spectacularly awful UI. Coincidence, or cause and effect?
DonHopkins on Feb 5, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech comp...
VLC's UI sucks so terribly, it's like they went WAY out of their way to make it sucks on purpose, and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there are any problems or ever consider fixing them.
One example of many [1]:
Type CMD-E (on Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on Windows) to get the video effects window.
Select "Geometry". Now check "Magnification/Zoom".
Notice how you get a picture-in-picture in the upper left corner, with a white rectangle showing the zoomed area, that you can move around by clicking. But if you press and hold, it also drags the entire windows (on a Mac -- I haven't tried on Windows -- VLC's UI and behavior on Mac and Windows diverges widely so I won't try to predict what happens).
Now look underneath the picture-in-picture and notices some ugly upper case pixelated text that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE". See how it's jaggy and rendered at the resolution of the movie you're playing itself, not at screen in a full resolution overlay with readable text?
Now look at the triangle with a jaggy curved hypotenuse below the jaggy words. That is the zoom "slider" (which also drags the window when you drag the mouse, so it's more like a clicker than a slider). See how it gets narrower and narrower in a succession of jaggy stair-step chunks, until it's merely one jaggy pixel wide? Well guess what: the TARGET AREA also gets narrow to match the width of the slider, so it's almost impossible to click on the bottom of the slider, to select the larger zoom sizes! Since the zoom slider is not very tall and its pixels fat and jaggy, you don't have fine grained access to very many zoom sizes at all, either. The zoom pixel steps are much bigger than screen pixels, depending on the video resolution!
What possible purpose could that serve? Why would any user guess that the lower narrow part of the slider represents a wider zoom showing a bigger rectangle over the picture-in-picture, while the top wider part of the slider represents a tighter zoom showing a smaller rectangle over the picture-in-picture? And what slider have you ever used that gets narrower from top to bottom, with a jaggy curve, and an impossibly narrow hard to click target area at the bottom?
This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player was 18 years ago!
Who could have possibly gone so far out of their way to design and implement such a terrible user interface on purpose, then smugly brushed off and ignored 16 years of bug reports and cries for help on the VLC message boards, without harboring a malicious contempt for their users?
That's not even the worst of it. Now check "Transform" and pick one of the transforms like "Rotate by 90 degrees". Guess what? The magnification interface itself is rotated 90 degrees, because it's drawn on the video before it's rotated, so now it appears at the top right of the screen, rotated 90 degrees itself.
And guess what else? The mouse clicks are not even transformed properly, so clicking on the magnification interfaces does NOTHING, rendering it completely useless! Depending on the aspect ratio of the video, you can't even click in the upper left corner where it USED to be and SHOULD still be to operate it, because it is clipped off the right edge of the window.
Are those ugly cosmetic and impossible usability problems not bad enough for you? Then make a playlist with one item. Select "Repeat" mode. Play the movie. Now go to the finder and remove, rename or move the movie you're playing, or just unplug the USB stick containing the video. Not an uncommon occurrence, right? Now VLC will hang up, consuming 100% of the CPU time, often times seizing up the entire Mac, turning on the fan, locking out all user input, and forcing you to reboot! This happens to me all the time.
These bugs have been around for years. The more you fiddle around with it, testing out the edge cases and trying to combine various poorly designed and implemented features, the more bugs you find.
File a bug report, they say. People report these problems again and again. The developers just ignore them and brush them off. I've tried reporting these and other bugs, describing them in meticulous detail, which is frustrating because once I start writing step-by-step instructions to reproduce one problem, I keep finding more and more problems, each worse than the last, and then they just brush me off and ignore my bug reports too.
VLC's user interface is maliciously terrible in so many ways, the developers are careless and arrogant towards their users, and there's no hope of the developers ever changing their ways, acknowledging the problems, and improving it. Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn [4] [5].
New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.
Now, if you are an AMV (Anime Music Video) creator and want to edit the video directly, the MKV is your best friend since it's a lossless video-content container due to the fact that you will find yourself adding effects to the video frames/audio. In this case you will want to lose as little as possible in your video, so MKV compression best suits.
TOPIC ANSWER: The reason why MKV is popular for anime is because of it's noted lossless compression. Anime show creators most likely notice this fact and use it to contain their video frames and audio tracks for maximum quality. - it has nothing to do with HD.
derefr on Feb 5, 2017 [–]
> Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn
Mind you, FOSS is contributed to by people scratching their own itch. It's not so much that VLC has a lot of otaku developers; it's that a lot of people who watch (or subtitle) "AMV cartoon porn" see a problem with, or missing feature in, VLC, and think "I'm a programmer; I can fix that", and dash off one-off patches.
DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | next [–]
It just puzzles me that out of eight bullet points summarizing the new features in VLC 2.1.5, one of them was "FOR ANIME FANS" and none of them were "FOR USABILITY". It's the contempt and dismissal that the developers show to usability bug reports when they brush them off and ignore them, which bewilders and frustrates me. Go read some of the discussion group postings and bug reports over the many years, and you will see what I mean. It's a deeply entrenched pattern of behavior.
majkinetor on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | prev [–]
Its very hard to contribute patch to foss tool in general. There is no substitution for agile development team.
DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | root | parent [–]
Oh I certainly wanted to contribute to the VLC project and integrate it into my own projects, but after having my concerns that I wrote up in great detail flippantly dismissed with such contempt, and seeing how the exact same thing happened to other users reporting legitimate longstanding bugs who were brushed off and ignored over so many years, I had no interest in contributing after that. It's fortunate that not every open source project suffers from such arrogant developers as VLC.
You've got some very confused beliefs about what mkv is and why it's used. Mkv is a container, not a codec, which is most often used to store lossy video and audio tracks. It can store lossless tracks too, but that is uncommon in practice. Other popular containers, such as mp4 (e.g. MPEG-4 Part 14), can also store lossless tracks.
The biggest reason anime people prefer mkv to mp4 is because mkv supports the ASS/SSA subtitle format, which is favored by the anime subbing community for its extremely versatile formatting options. For instance, it is common for subbers to cover up signs containing Japanese text with translated subtitle text, tracked to the video, styled and transformed to appear virtually seamless. Less relevant but still important to some people, mkv supports a plethera of old (and very lossy) video codecs, which is sometimes relevant when it comes to repackaging old encodes of hard to find media. Being able to copy in the old video codec without transcoding preserves what little quality there is while allowing you to package it with modern subtitles. Mkv also has superior support for chapters, metadata, etc.
But I get it, you hate anime and think weebs are pervs. I thought you were a man who values tolerance highly, but whatever man. It has little bearing on technical matters. Incidentally, anime people generally favor mpv above VLC, because the ASS/SSA support is a lot better in mpv (mpv uses it for rendering the psuedo-GUI.)
As for the bugs and UX issues in VLC, I assume that your claims are more accurate than your understanding of media containers, but VLC is nevertheless the best video player to recommend to nontechnical users you might find yourself playing tech support for. They won't tinker with it and therefore won't discover most of the issues you're talking about. What they'll get out of it is a media player that plays whatever file they throw at it, without feeling the need to run sketchy "codec packs" they found god knows where on the internet.
Those aren't my confused beliefs, I was literally quoting the text at the links.
And you don't have to be so defensive by jumping to conclusions that I hate "weebs" and think they're all pervs (although the ones obsessed with sexualizing little girls are certainly misogynistic pervs). What I hate is spending precious time and effort catering to small groups of people obsessed with particular fetishes (perverted and misogynistic or not), at the expense of prioritizing solving the real problems of large groups of people suffering from particular egregious bugs and usability issues.
Remember: it's been A DOZEN YEARS since I reported the problems in great detail with step-by-step instructions to reproduce them, and they STILL haven't fixed those problems that I and other people reported. Maybe refusing to ever acknowledge or fix those horrible bugs is Rémi Denis-Courmont's way of getting revenge on me for hurting his feelings by posting a wall of text he claims he didn't bother to read, at the expense of all of his other users and the quality and usability of VLC, so now I'm sorry I ever took the time to try to help by reporting and documenting the bug, and I'll never do that again, but he still seems pretty arrogant and thin skinned to me, even quite recently. And VLC's user interface STILL sucks.
Edit: The link I'm quoting is myself, quoting the text in another link written by SOMEONE ELSE. Literally, the VLC release notes, and an anime discussion about MKV which I read before I quoted it, so I already fully understand what you're mansplaining to me, and I'm not complaining about cartoon porn or MKV, I'm complaining about idiotic priorities. I'm sorry I touched a nerve that triggered you, but I don't hate "weebs" or porn, just misogyny and child abuse and terrible user interfaces. If you want to argue in favor of those things, go back to 4chan.
The link you're quoting is yourself, complaining about anime porn and asserting that mkv is popular because it's lossless.
Mkv really has nothing to do with VLCs usability problems. You're just grinding an axe against it because it's not a feature you value (or seem to even understand) but is valued by people you have evident disdain for (why even bring pornography into the discussion?)
I see Rémi Denis-Courmont's arrogant attitude and disrespect for users and developers hasn't improved in all these years. And neither has VLC's spectacularly awful UI. Coincidence, or cause and effect?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573499
DonHopkins on Feb 5, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech comp...
VLC's UI sucks so terribly, it's like they went WAY out of their way to make it sucks on purpose, and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there are any problems or ever consider fixing them. One example of many [1]:
Type CMD-E (on Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on Windows) to get the video effects window.
Select "Geometry". Now check "Magnification/Zoom".
Notice how you get a picture-in-picture in the upper left corner, with a white rectangle showing the zoomed area, that you can move around by clicking. But if you press and hold, it also drags the entire windows (on a Mac -- I haven't tried on Windows -- VLC's UI and behavior on Mac and Windows diverges widely so I won't try to predict what happens).
Now look underneath the picture-in-picture and notices some ugly upper case pixelated text that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE". See how it's jaggy and rendered at the resolution of the movie you're playing itself, not at screen in a full resolution overlay with readable text?
Now look at the triangle with a jaggy curved hypotenuse below the jaggy words. That is the zoom "slider" (which also drags the window when you drag the mouse, so it's more like a clicker than a slider). See how it gets narrower and narrower in a succession of jaggy stair-step chunks, until it's merely one jaggy pixel wide? Well guess what: the TARGET AREA also gets narrow to match the width of the slider, so it's almost impossible to click on the bottom of the slider, to select the larger zoom sizes! Since the zoom slider is not very tall and its pixels fat and jaggy, you don't have fine grained access to very many zoom sizes at all, either. The zoom pixel steps are much bigger than screen pixels, depending on the video resolution!
What possible purpose could that serve? Why would any user guess that the lower narrow part of the slider represents a wider zoom showing a bigger rectangle over the picture-in-picture, while the top wider part of the slider represents a tighter zoom showing a smaller rectangle over the picture-in-picture? And what slider have you ever used that gets narrower from top to bottom, with a jaggy curve, and an impossibly narrow hard to click target area at the bottom?
This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player was 18 years ago!
Who could have possibly gone so far out of their way to design and implement such a terrible user interface on purpose, then smugly brushed off and ignored 16 years of bug reports and cries for help on the VLC message boards, without harboring a malicious contempt for their users?
That's not even the worst of it. Now check "Transform" and pick one of the transforms like "Rotate by 90 degrees". Guess what? The magnification interface itself is rotated 90 degrees, because it's drawn on the video before it's rotated, so now it appears at the top right of the screen, rotated 90 degrees itself.
And guess what else? The mouse clicks are not even transformed properly, so clicking on the magnification interfaces does NOTHING, rendering it completely useless! Depending on the aspect ratio of the video, you can't even click in the upper left corner where it USED to be and SHOULD still be to operate it, because it is clipped off the right edge of the window.
Are those ugly cosmetic and impossible usability problems not bad enough for you? Then make a playlist with one item. Select "Repeat" mode. Play the movie. Now go to the finder and remove, rename or move the movie you're playing, or just unplug the USB stick containing the video. Not an uncommon occurrence, right? Now VLC will hang up, consuming 100% of the CPU time, often times seizing up the entire Mac, turning on the fan, locking out all user input, and forcing you to reboot! This happens to me all the time.
These bugs have been around for years. The more you fiddle around with it, testing out the edge cases and trying to combine various poorly designed and implemented features, the more bugs you find.
File a bug report, they say. People report these problems again and again. The developers just ignore them and brush them off. I've tried reporting these and other bugs, describing them in meticulous detail, which is frustrating because once I start writing step-by-step instructions to reproduce one problem, I keep finding more and more problems, each worse than the last, and then they just brush me off and ignore my bug reports too.
VLC's user interface is maliciously terrible in so many ways, the developers are careless and arrogant towards their users, and there's no hope of the developers ever changing their ways, acknowledging the problems, and improving it. Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn [4] [5].
[1] http://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV
[2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php
[3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
[4] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html
FOR ANIME FANS
New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.
[5] https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=208770
Now, if you are an AMV (Anime Music Video) creator and want to edit the video directly, the MKV is your best friend since it's a lossless video-content container due to the fact that you will find yourself adding effects to the video frames/audio. In this case you will want to lose as little as possible in your video, so MKV compression best suits.
TOPIC ANSWER: The reason why MKV is popular for anime is because of it's noted lossless compression. Anime show creators most likely notice this fact and use it to contain their video frames and audio tracks for maximum quality. - it has nothing to do with HD.
derefr on Feb 5, 2017 [–]
> Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn Mind you, FOSS is contributed to by people scratching their own itch. It's not so much that VLC has a lot of otaku developers; it's that a lot of people who watch (or subtitle) "AMV cartoon porn" see a problem with, or missing feature in, VLC, and think "I'm a programmer; I can fix that", and dash off one-off patches.
DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | next [–]
It just puzzles me that out of eight bullet points summarizing the new features in VLC 2.1.5, one of them was "FOR ANIME FANS" and none of them were "FOR USABILITY". It's the contempt and dismissal that the developers show to usability bug reports when they brush them off and ignore them, which bewilders and frustrates me. Go read some of the discussion group postings and bug reports over the many years, and you will see what I mean. It's a deeply entrenched pattern of behavior.
majkinetor on Feb 6, 2017 | parent | prev [–]
Its very hard to contribute patch to foss tool in general. There is no substitution for agile development team.
DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2017 | root | parent [–]
Oh I certainly wanted to contribute to the VLC project and integrate it into my own projects, but after having my concerns that I wrote up in great detail flippantly dismissed with such contempt, and seeing how the exact same thing happened to other users reporting legitimate longstanding bugs who were brushed off and ignored over so many years, I had no interest in contributing after that. It's fortunate that not every open source project suffers from such arrogant developers as VLC.