Ah! Lexx - The Dark Zone! (too bad I missed the movie night.) But seriously: calling graphical player controls “random visual noise” seems a little hart to me.
Boris: It is a fair comparison, because it is also about “cultural” differences, and the ATTITUDE that Software Vendors on Windows have towards their users.
I still think that Windows Media Player and DivX Player kick Linux Player’s arse in regard to usability. The linux user interfaces just suck.
Currently I’ve got two media players installed on my machines (Windows btw): Windows Media Player (plus some extra codecs) and VLC. VLC is there for only one reason: it plays everything and it plays everything reliably (which is not true for DirectShow-based Players in Windows at all: they usually have problems with some of the more obscure features, and it’s far too easy to mess up some codecs).
However when it comes to the user interface, VLC just sucks. There’s no way to intuitively understand anything except basic playback. On the other hand, every fool on earth can handle WMP or DivX player.
I don’t care about fucking “usability”, I want to watch the movie, but I agree that VLCs interface sucks, it has to much buttons, I don’t like buttons, there are already plenty of these on my keybord, I’d rather use these.
And btw. what du you want to do with a video player except “basic” playback? “Advanced” playback?
There are however some features that I use in mplayer, and I am sure that the windows media player misses them, so I wonder what kind of advanced features are so usable. Cropping a letterboxed movie to make it fit onto my wide-screen monitor, and using EDLs to cut out ads, are the only two “advanced” features that I use and that I can think of.
The Keyboard thing is exactly what I mean. Using the command line for *anything* might be fast, but it’s totally counter-intuitive. Everything you want to do requires reading a bunchload of man pages.
And regarding the “advanced features”: that’s exactly what I mean! open source media players usually are much more feature-rich than anything commercial - but it’s far too hard for the occasional user to figure out how to do the really cool stuff.
For instance, I once tried to play back a video file with a separate subtitle file (I don’t know if you’re familiar with text-based subtitle files - they contain the subtitles as plain text together with time codes). The subtitles were made for NTSC playback, the video was PAL (or the other way around, I don’t remember). Of course, the only player installed that supports video playback plus subtitles is an open source one (VLC) and it even supports adjusting the playback speed of the subtitles - I just never could find out how. Which sucks.
Am I the only one who noticed that the Windows movie players are showing ads where the Linux movie player shows a movie. I always thought that the best feature of a movie player was its capability to play movies
October 17th, 2007 at 16:44
Linux is a kernel, commercial(and not pretending to be anything but) software compared with an non-commerial player.. is hardly a fair comparison.
BTW, Mplayer SMplayer and VLC for Windows are just the same regardless of platform.
Apples and Oranges…
October 18th, 2007 at 7:59
Ah! Lexx - The Dark Zone! (too bad I missed the movie night.) But seriously: calling graphical player controls “random visual noise” seems a little hart to me.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:30
I would have added more arrows pointing at other visual noise, but there already were so many of them.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:52
Boris: It is a fair comparison, because it is also about “cultural” differences, and the ATTITUDE that Software Vendors on Windows have towards their users.
October 21st, 2007 at 14:35
I still think that Windows Media Player and DivX Player kick Linux Player’s arse in regard to usability. The linux user interfaces just suck.
Currently I’ve got two media players installed on my machines (Windows btw): Windows Media Player (plus some extra codecs) and VLC. VLC is there for only one reason: it plays everything and it plays everything reliably (which is not true for DirectShow-based Players in Windows at all: they usually have problems with some of the more obscure features, and it’s far too easy to mess up some codecs).
However when it comes to the user interface, VLC just sucks. There’s no way to intuitively understand anything except basic playback. On the other hand, every fool on earth can handle WMP or DivX player.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:16
I don’t care about fucking “usability”, I want to watch the movie, but I agree that VLCs interface sucks, it has to much buttons, I don’t like buttons, there are already plenty of these on my keybord, I’d rather use these.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:25
And btw. what du you want to do with a video player except “basic” playback? “Advanced” playback?
There are however some features that I use in mplayer, and I am sure that the windows media player misses them, so I wonder what kind of advanced features are so usable. Cropping a letterboxed movie to make it fit onto my wide-screen monitor, and using EDLs to cut out ads, are the only two “advanced” features that I use and that I can think of.
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:57
The Keyboard thing is exactly what I mean. Using the command line for *anything* might be fast, but it’s totally counter-intuitive. Everything you want to do requires reading a bunchload of man pages.
And regarding the “advanced features”: that’s exactly what I mean! open source media players usually are much more feature-rich than anything commercial - but it’s far too hard for the occasional user to figure out how to do the really cool stuff.
For instance, I once tried to play back a video file with a separate subtitle file (I don’t know if you’re familiar with text-based subtitle files - they contain the subtitles as plain text together with time codes). The subtitles were made for NTSC playback, the video was PAL (or the other way around, I don’t remember). Of course, the only player installed that supports video playback plus subtitles is an open source one (VLC) and it even supports adjusting the playback speed of the subtitles - I just never could find out how. Which sucks.
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:29
There is a directshow filter to support text-subtitles in windows media player
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:53
Am I the only one who noticed that the Windows movie players are showing ads where the Linux movie player shows a movie. I always thought that the best feature of a movie player was its capability to play movies