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Comment by SimHacker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

I don't know -- I'm using a 3 year old version where the windowed and fullscreen controls are almost the same. (the only difference is fullscreen doesn't have "shuffle" or "playlist")

The same guy who did the same for Quicktime and tons of other programs back in the day...

You're quite right. It's almost unusable on Windows in its default configuration.

I particularly like how difficult it is to toggle full-screen playback with the keyboard. F11 makes it full screen, but doesn't hide the controls. Ctrl-H hides the controls, but also disables keyboard shortcuts!

So now, when you want to get out of full-screen mode, you have to know that you need to press Esc followed by F11. Not even double-click gets you back to windowed mode.

This kind of asymmetric mode toggling drives me up the walls. That, and the fact it doesn't pause when you click the video.

This must be some new weird change with the most recent version. The version I use has F as the fullscreen button, and either F or ESC will exit fullscreen. And the controls auto-hide.

That's why I stick to the 1.1.5 version!

No, F11 is the only way documented in the menu to get full-screen playback. F is not documented anywhere in the player UI; instead, it's buried away in the keybinding section of the preferences. The whole point of showing accelerators in the menu is to enable keyboard shortcuts for frequent commands to be learned; that VLC doesn't do this consistently is, alone, an indictment of its UI.

F11 and Alt-Enter are generally the two idioms for getting full-screen behaviour on Windows. Both work in Media Player Classic. Alt-Enter comes from the old DOS box from Windows 3; I'm not sure, but I think IE 4 pioneered F11. In any case, F11 works with Firefox, Chrome and IE; Alt-Enter also works with IE, Mintty, etc.

Nop. 2.0.5 here (2.0.8 is the latest) and f works just fine. I guess barrkel had enough time to whine on a forum but not enough to look in the program's preferences.

OK, perhaps I was too harsh saying that VLC had the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. I had forgotten about The Gimp. They are both suffering from the same kind of pathological user interface problems that seem to result from a pretentious and cliquish committified developer community whose individual members each care much more about overdeveloping their particular paroquial corners of the applications than how it all fits together as a whole, and who religiously refuse to even consider looking at competing commercial products because to expose themselves to any non-open-source software would make them impure and suck out all their precious bodily fluids. But at least VLC's name wasn't chosen for the express purpose of being bigoted and obnoxious and repelling ordinary mainstream users, under the false pretense of being whimsically humorous and self deprecating like Git.

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.

I had a problem similar to the one you described, but it went away when I moved backwards to VLC 1.1.5. I think 1.1.10/1.1.11 was just a very buggy release, as mkv playback is also broken on that version.

Those are "options buried in the settings", quite the opposite of "feature creep". You've got to enable them, and doing so makes the application behave thew way that you want it to, and not be confined to the default configuration.

The programs that have a problem are the ones that dumb-down the UI to the point that it's impossible to deviate from the defaults.

It is the iTunes of the open source media world. An abomination, at least it isn't as bad as Calibre.

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