Oxymoron of the day: Help Desk
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Videolan is preparing VLC 2.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux
VIDEO SOFTWARE OUTFIT Videolan has shown off VLC 2.0 for the Mac, which features an extensive redesign.
Videolan is best known for its VLC video player that supports a multitude of codecs and is generally regarded to be one of the best operating system agnostic video players available. Now the Videolan team has shown off the redesigned user interface for VLC 2.0 on the Mac.
Videolan developer Felix Kühne wrote, "VLC 2.0's interface for Mac is dramatically different from its previous revision, both technically and usage-wise." Changes include the playlist and video output sharing the same window and most importantly Kühne claims the interface is "noticeably faster".
Interestingly VLC's users seemed to like the raw simplicity of the old interface. There's no doubt that VLC 2.0 on the Mac will feel like a more polished product, but some users were complaining about the extra clutter and not simply being able to drop files onto a VLC icon.
Kühne said VLC 2.0 will be available later this week for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. µ
Tags: Software
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Over the years, I've stuck with mplayer because I always play videos full screen ("-fs" option with mplayer) and then control the playback via the keyboard.
mplayer logically uses the arrow keys to jump forwardas and backwards (the only sensible choice surely?), but VLC completely ignores the arrow keys, which is frankly quite poor.
If the audio gets out of sync (not uncommon!), keypad + or - adjusts it on mplayer in 100ms steps. VLC can't even seem to do this from the keyboard - you have to use the mouse to bring up a clunky dialogue box and start clicking tiny up or down arrows to change the sync.
mplayer for the win, because it's way better w.r.t. keyboard controls - almost every common function is mapped to a single key press (subtitles, deinterlacing, onscreen display etc. etc.) whereas VLC forces mouse usage a lot of the time, which is a pain.
The older version works just fine for me. The only complaint I have is lousy playlist management. In Winamp (a 5-year old version of winamp, in fact) I can load a m3u file and see how much time the files on the list take in total. In VLC I can't. Rather stupid, isn't it. And if I see a file and want to remove it from the m3u and save the m3u, there's only a "Save as" option which starts all the time in a totally different folder than where the m3u I loaded is. Why do I have to search for it all the time...
Over the years I have used vlc on every os I was using. I consider it the best free (or even paid) app around. It can play anything and do far more than just play a movie or song. Thanks to all those at vlc.