VLC 4.0 sneak peek—a look at its work-in-progress new interface

VLC 4.0's brand-new interface abstracts media files away from their content.

Read the whole story

 

[bfink2]

I don't really need an application to manage files and folders for me, because I already have the operating system's application to manage files and folders for me. I can't think of a single time I've ever opened a local file in VLC by using File>Open….

Same, but i'm pretty sure if someone is trying to hide the file system, the 'experience' they are aiming for is that opening a file from your file manager in vlc will not open the file but add it to their library. You'll either have to search it there to play it or remove it if you don't want to have it stored there once you played it.

I'd be very surprised if the old open-play-forget mechanism survives this design change and the whole library concept was optional.

 

[Scandinavian Film]

Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

It got overpowered by "volunteer devs/designers for open-source projects will work on whatever interests them, not necessarily what their users want." Luckily, open-source also means anyone can fork the project and revert the UI, and the VideoLAN project encourages this: they've abstracted all the multimedia handling as a separate library so people can build their own media players that can play back anything VLC can. They even have code examples!

 

[NewCrow]

I sure wish they would fix their SMB streaming on the Android version. It used to work fine, and then I guess they ripped it out and rewrote it, and the new version doesn't work at all for me. I've struggled and struggled with it, and ended up having to switch to NFS.

Basically, it's just horribly slow. It "works", in the sense that I can browse directories and click on movie files, but when it actually tries to play anything, I'm lucky to get even one frame rendered before it freezes. Most of the time it doesn't even manage one frame.

NFS is dismal by comparison. It works, after a fashion, but it takes about ten seconds for a stream to start, and then trying to fast forward or reverse is excruciatingly slow. I'd sure like SMB back; it handled those things just fine.

For me, using VLC on Android, stored MP3 playlists with data on Samba shares won't work unless I first kill the VLC app (force close from the settings). Then it works until the device has been left idling for several hours. Annoying, but manageable.

 

[jamesb2147]

My god. What have they done?

Am I the only person left who finds the filesystem to be an actually useful UI element; not something to be hidden(generally by an abstraction that doesn't quite paper over all the cracks but is thorough enough to prevent fixing any of the said cracks) and replaced by some kind of shallow discoverability slurry that looks fantastic as long as your use case is trivial; and nowhere else?

You are definitely not the only one.

I mean, you could abstract away the filesystem entirely, sure... but then you'd have to replace it with some other set of nestable folders, so that I could actually organize my content the way I want it.

I almost never use the Movies or TV interfaces in Kodi, for example... because I want frequently to proritize movies I've added in late 2020, for example, so I just browse into the movies/2020/2020-q4 folder to look through those.

Or I want to separate cartoons from other kinds of movies... which isn't always accurately represented in metadata... so I go to movies/cartoons. Or even movies/cartoons/anime, movies/cartoons/adultswim... you get the picture.

You COULD implement all that separately in a "library" interface—but why, when there's already a filesystem beneath it?

Because the filesystem is strictly heirarchical so everything you put into it has to fit into that pattern.

What happens if you have an animated movie from a japanese studio that you added in early 2021? Do you put it in both movies/2021/2021-q1 and movies/cartoons/anime, thereby having two copies of the same file? Or do you put it in just one of those folders, thereby breaking your carefully-considered organization system?

When you force everything to be heirarchical, eventually it will break down, or become hopelessly convoluted. The real world doesn't organize things conveniently in a heirarchical system. We only do it that way on computers because that's what we were taught based on the technology available at the time, and we've learned to force everything into a folder heirarchy by hook or by crook.

(Yes I know symlinks exist. If you use symlinks to organize your media, you shouldn't be on Ars Technica, you should be on alt.news.tech or something. Is usenet still even a thing?)

*Is seen*

You can't tell me what to do!

Also, hard links. Soft links suck. That said, I don't use my FS hierarchy the way Jim described; I actually do use a metadata driven interface via Plex. However, that interface took many, many years to develop with numerous partners and crowdsourced data, and it still isn't 100% even for my library.

 

[MechR]

Ew. I've always hated non-single-window UIs, as well as players with no GUI, and this update somehow has both.

Showing a panel of files instead of a blank box isn't a bad idea per se (though not my personal preference), but not including a folder view is dumb.

Right... and that gets a lot more difficult, when right-click and open with VLC doesn't play the file, it just adds it to a "library" of anywhere from tens to thousands of files.

That's seriously what it does now? Good lord.

 

[lunarworks]

VLC's trying to be something it's not.

Unlike music, I don't keep a video library on my computer. I'm not much of a re-watch person. So, a video jukebox is useless to me. I prefer simply to use the OS file system to browse to where the file is, and double-click on it.

Someone recently clued-me into IINA, a VLC alternative for macOS that's written native to the most recent macOS APIs. It's lightweight, and seems to work well enough for me.

 

[LuDux]

VLC wants to be the Gimp of media players.

 

[NewCrow]

BTW, for any of my fellow Linux froods who are always like "why is snap even a thing"... checking this out using the snap was pretty awesome, and knowing I can get rid of it without bunging up my system just as easily as I installed it is even better.

Then again, I can't access any of my ACTUAL media with the snap, because the snap only has access to a few specific directories, not including /data where all my media is stored beneath, so that was fun...

Since I kind of suspect your data is in a zpool

I have no idea why you would suspect such a thing...

And yes, there are workarounds to defeat the snap's access segmentation. For the record, my Videos folder itself is a ZFS dataset... I could also work around this by abandoning my filesystem structure of /data/media/movies/whatever, /data/documents/work/arstechnica/whatever, etc and so forth and so on, and just mounting all of my media documents beneath my user folder... But I don't wanna. And I ain't gonna.

There are even some pretty decent reasons for not wanting to nest absolutely everything under my user folder... like the fact that my media stuff isn't just for me on my computer; most of it is shared across the LAN to the whole family. But as much as anything else I kinda just start getting pig-stubborn resentful about it, if we're being honest (and perhaps unfairly distrustful of things under "user folders" due to some very bad experiences with Windows and user folders, in the past).

I totally agree. I never use the user directory for data storage, except when I'm lazy and create temporary directories on the desktop.

It started the second Microsoft deemed itself better than me at deciding how I should manage my data.

 

[designinca]

Ok, so on the assumption that someone influential or connected with the VideoLAN group is monitoring this, my 2 cents:

First, excellent props for separating the controls from the playback window; this has been long needed for those of us (like me) who use VLC all the time for live presentation to classes and audiences. You've got to assume people have multiple monitors or devices these days.

Second: uh, I don't know anyone who uses the brain-dead Videos folder for storing their media. Mine are all over the place: movies in entertainment (a separate hard drive), teaching media in locations related to the institution, consultancy material in folders related to the client, family videos in another folder. Default locations need to be able to be specified in Properties, and not just one, either. Yes, I know one can evade this by just going to the relevant folder and double clicking the file, but still ... look at Blender and its excellent Recent and Favorites options in the Open/Save dialog for a fine example.

Third, can we associate video settings with a particular file and not have them persist for all files? Some files need adjusting but one doesn't want to change that file permanently to preserve the hashtag (I present media in courtroom settings occasionally).

And last, please add the ability for video and animation teachers to save selections in a video and adjust their start and stop times after they've been selected. If I want to show one particular scene or transition out of a video or movie, being able to non destructively save (and subsequently refine) that selection - or those multiple selections (hint) - would be really useful.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

I guess the traffic cone is iconic, in that it's an icon... what it has to do with playing videos I cannot guess.

Anyway if it can't handle folders, I'll stick with the old version. Folders exist for a reason. Nobody needs this sort of nonsense.

 

[bthylafh]

A big ol , maybe?

Maybe a nice big -ϵ϶- to signify "expansion".

 

[jdale]

First, excellent props for separating the controls from the playback window; this has been long needed for those of us (like me) who use VLC all the time for live presentation to classes and audiences. You've got to assume people have multiple monitors or devices these days.

That's a good argument for a tear-off control panel. As long as it also offers the option to dock. A separate control panel is no use for a user watching on their (single) laptop screen.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

My god. What have they done?

Am I the only person left who finds the filesystem to be an actually useful UI element; not something to be hidden(generally by an abstraction that doesn't quite paper over all the cracks but is thorough enough to prevent fixing any of the said cracks) and replaced by some kind of shallow discoverability slurry that looks fantastic as long as your use case is trivial; and nowhere else?

You are definitely not the only one.

I mean, you could abstract away the filesystem entirely, sure... but then you'd have to replace it with some other set of nestable folders, so that I could actually organize my content the way I want it.

I almost never use the Movies or TV interfaces in Kodi, for example... because I want frequently to proritize movies I've added in late 2020, for example, so I just browse into the movies/2020/2020-q4 folder to look through those.

Or I want to separate cartoons from other kinds of movies... which isn't always accurately represented in metadata... so I go to movies/cartoons. Or even movies/cartoons/anime, movies/cartoons/adultswim... you get the picture.

You COULD implement all that separately in a "library" interface—but why, when there's already a filesystem beneath it?

Because the filesystem is strictly heirarchical so everything you put into it has to fit into that pattern.

What happens if you have an animated movie from a japanese studio that you added in early 2021? Do you put it in both movies/2021/2021-q1 and movies/cartoons/anime, thereby having two copies of the same file? Or do you put it in just one of those folders, thereby breaking your carefully-considered organization system?

When you force everything to be heirarchical, eventually it will break down, or become hopelessly convoluted. The real world doesn't organize things conveniently in a heirarchical system. We only do it that way on computers because that's what we were taught based on the technology available at the time, and we've learned to force everything into a folder heirarchy by hook or by crook.

(Yes I know symlinks exist. If you use symlinks to organize your media, you shouldn't be on Ars Technica, you should be on alt.news.tech or something. Is usenet still even a thing?)

Libraries existed before computers were invented. They organised books in a hierarchical system. Because that's how you organise things. Sure, putting everything in a big pile can also be considered an organisational technique, but it does not scale very well...

 

[tnrocker]

I sure wish they would fix their SMB streaming on the Android version. It used to work fine, and then I guess they ripped it out and rewrote it, and the new version doesn't work at all for me. I've struggled and struggled with it, and ended up having to switch to NFS.

Basically, it's just horribly slow. It "works", in the sense that I can browse directories and click on movie files, but when it actually tries to play anything, I'm lucky to get even one frame rendered before it freezes. Most of the time it doesn't even manage one frame.

NFS is dismal by comparison. It works, after a fashion, but it takes about ten seconds for a stream to start, and then trying to fast forward or reverse is excruciatingly slow. I'd sure like SMB back; it handled those things just fine.

I am able to stream from my SMB shares using VLC on Android TV. I haven't tried from my Android Phone. It mostly works well but Authentication is buggy. It will play a few shows than loop back to the log in. I often have to quit the app, clear cache and data. The iOS app seems to work better.

 

[milski]

Hm, I think some of the things being discussed might be Linux specific differences. I have few week old dev build of 4.0 on my Mac, and double click/open with VLC on a file immediately starts the video, none of the described media library mess.

 

[Jim Salter]

 

[garretn]

Oh goodie, they turned it into yet another library player because absolutely nobody asked for that.

I always use VLC because it was simple, could play anything, and had advanced options/selections in an easy to use GUI. Now it's more or less the same generic library player as the other dime-a-dozen, great... Talk about getting rid of the main reason to use it just so they could fall in line with everyone else.

I'm not even aware of a good alternative that isn't at least slightly janky, or too minimal for it's interface (on linux). Plenty of them will play videos fine, but none of them really had as good of menus as VLC not-4.0 does.

 

[Hack-n-Slash]

maybe it's just me but an ellipsis standing in for 'there's more here', is way more intuitive than a hamburger standing in for whatever the hell it's supposed to represent.

I agree with this; it was a while after the explosion of the hamburger menu onto the software ecosystem before I really got comfortable with knowing wtf a hamburger menu was supposed to be. An ellipsis makes a lot more logical sense.

The major problems now are first that everybody DOES know what a hamburger menu is... and more importantly, that the ellipsis is far lower contrast, at least as implemented here. It's downright easy to miss.

A big ol , maybe?

From the screenshot, it's the same ellipsis as chromium edge...
... which, to be fair, explains why no one recognizes it...

 

[Fred Duck]

VLC 4.0 isn't ready for prime time use yet...

In other words, 4.0 is one of "The Not Ready for Prime Time Players."

VLC 4.0 instead spawns a new player window, separate from the browsing/control window from which the video was selected.

Oh, goodie. First, we had controls embedded below most video players. Then most switched to floating them near the bottom of the video window. Now we have controls somewhere else entirely. What a jolly clever idea this doesn't seem to be.

Ah, well. It's a beta. They can kick as many tyres as they want and go bananas as far as I'm concerned and we shouldn't be bothered unless the "hide everything from the users" silliness actually appears in release candidates.

The problem appears to be that 4.0 currently envisions itself as a library application much like iTunes of old. However, iTunes by default handled filing all of your media and presented it to you with handy thumbnails and cover art. As far as I can tell, 132.6% of the VLC userbase use it as a media player so replacing a player with a library/player sounds like exactly what no one was asking for. Even if it turns out to be Super iTunes ++, unless it manages your library for you, this can't possibly work. So, how many people are willing to give up control of their sorting?

I guarantee this would go over better if they continue making a VLC Media Player and add this new thing as VLC Media Hub. Then, if people like it, they can "deprioritise" Player in favour of Hub.

 

[firsttimecaller]

my quick assessment, i don't know what they are trying to solve.
maybe others have a different work flow for VLC that i am unaware of but right now im in the camp of "i didn't ask for this."

 

[GottaSaySomething]

"Let's focus all our attention on asserting ourselves as your one and only Media Library and being the center of your 'digital life', while scanning all your directories, obfuscating any actual information about the media, and then suck at the basics." -- every video/music player I've ever uninstalled.

My first response to these screenshots was "What the fork?"

I got the impression that it only scans ~/Videos, and mine's usually empty, so.... In fact the only thing in ~/Pictures are VLC snaps (it's saving of frames)

As long as they don't fuck it too much (as in the nice check button for "open new instance each time" - which is there by default) I'm happy.

But yeah not sure why they're doing this. Boredom?

 

[Worminator]

QuickTime for Windows

Whoa! Flashback to 1998!

 

[GottaSaySomething]

Oh goodie, they turned it into yet another library player because absolutely nobody asked for that.

I always use VLC because it was simple, could play anything, and had advanced options/selections in an easy to use GUI. Now it's more or less the same generic library player as the other dime-a-dozen, great... Talk about getting rid of the main reason to use it just so they could fall in line with everyone else.

I'm not even aware of a good alternative that isn't at least slightly janky, or too minimal for it's interface (on linux). Plenty of them will play videos fine, but none of them really had as good of menus as VLC not-4.0 does.

mplayer's great. unless you hate keyboard shortcuts - if you do should probably kill yourself before trying mplayer on the "list of things to do"

 

[silmaril]

r/thanksihateit

 

[FancyShark]

Weird. I've managed to make the current version of VLC play a video in a separate window from the control interface, but that was because I accidentally started the same video twice (double-clicked and double-clicked again when the first try took too long).

The result was the video playing in one window with no attached UI while the other window had the UI and a blank space in the spot the video would normally appear. The playing video didn't respond to any input on the control UI.

I thought it was a bug, since there's no good reason to do something like that.

Really hope that wasn't a preview of the new version.

 

[eatrains]

I’m so glad Macs have a standard space at the top of the screen for standard File, Edit, etc menus. When other platforms put them in the window, devs look for reasons to get rid of them entirely to reclaim the space and then struggle to replace their functionality.

QuickTime Player and IINA, folks.

 

[J.King]

BTW, for any of my fellow Linux froods who are always like "why is snap even a thing"... checking this out using the snap was pretty awesome, and knowing I can get rid of it without bunging up my system just as easily as I installed it is even better.

Then again, I can't access any of my ACTUAL media with the snap, because the snap only has access to a few specific directories, not including /data where all my media is stored beneath, so that was fun...

I understand why snaps are "a thing", as they say, but this is exactly why I don't like them. Sure, bundle dependencies all you like, but security barriers like that are one of the perennial usability problems of snaps (along with theme integration, and as I recall missing or outdated locale data), and I haven't seen any sign of it getting better.

My first experience with snaps was actually one for foobar2000, which bundled Wine and included a quite decent .desktop file; at first blush it was wonderful and simple and a success story for snaps. Lack of access to the filesystem and poor integration with the desktop in general meant I couldn't use it how I wanted (by right-clicking on files/directories in Nemo and opening them with foobar2000), though, and I saw no path to improving things without making my own snap from the ground up.

It ended up being far better to just read the Wine documentation for five minutes, write a wrapping shell script in another five minutes, and then be off on my way using foobar2000 like any other application on my system (modulo unavoidable Wine startup time).

 

[Myritek]

Wow, gonna have to apologize to all the people who were so skeptical in the last thread. I kinda shared the skepticism, but I do find VLC's current UI sort of un-intuitive in multiple respects, so I hoped that their efforts would be focused on figuring that out.

But nope--it's all this other garbage that seems like it's just going to be getting in everyone's way. Some of these I recognize as following trends, such as focusing on the media library. But separating out controls and player?! I never thought they'd go that far off course.

 

[orangpelupa]

The new interface could work better if it supports global instant search like "everything"

 

[Christarp]

Oh no.

 

[malor]

I sure wish they would fix their SMB streaming on the Android version. It used to work fine, and then I guess they ripped it out and rewrote it, and the new version doesn't work at all for me. I've struggled and struggled with it, and ended up having to switch to NFS.

Basically, it's just horribly slow. It "works", in the sense that I can browse directories and click on movie files, but when it actually tries to play anything, I'm lucky to get even one frame rendered before it freezes. Most of the time it doesn't even manage one frame.

NFS is dismal by comparison. It works, after a fashion, but it takes about ten seconds for a stream to start, and then trying to fast forward or reverse is excruciatingly slow. I'd sure like SMB back; it handled those things just fine.

Have you considered just going back to the old version VLC where that still worked on android then? that is the great benefit of android over apple. when stuff breaks you can revert to the old version without any issues until it is fixed...or just sit on the old version forever.

It's on an Android TV, and I don't have root, so I don't think I have any way to do that?

 

[jbee]

My god. What have they done?

Am I the only person left who finds the filesystem to be an actually useful UI element; not something to be hidden(generally by an abstraction that doesn't quite paper over all the cracks but is thorough enough to prevent fixing any of the said cracks) and replaced by some kind of shallow discoverability slurry that looks fantastic as long as your use case is trivial; and nowhere else?

You are definitely not the only one.

I mean, you could abstract away the filesystem entirely, sure... but then you'd have to replace it with some other set of nestable folders, so that I could actually organize my content the way I want it.

I almost never use the Movies or TV interfaces in Kodi, for example... because I want frequently to proritize movies I've added in late 2020, for example, so I just browse into the movies/2020/2020-q4 folder to look through those.

Or I want to separate cartoons from other kinds of movies... which isn't always accurately represented in metadata... so I go to movies/cartoons. Or even movies/cartoons/anime, movies/cartoons/adultswim... you get the picture.

You COULD implement all that separately in a "library" interface—but why, when there's already a filesystem beneath it?

Because the filesystem is strictly heirarchical so everything you put into it has to fit into that pattern.

What happens if you have an animated movie from a japanese studio that you added in early 2021? Do you put it in both movies/2021/2021-q1 and movies/cartoons/anime, thereby having two copies of the same file? Or do you put it in just one of those folders, thereby breaking your carefully-considered organization system?

When you force everything to be heirarchical, eventually it will break down, or become hopelessly convoluted. The real world doesn't organize things conveniently in a heirarchical system. We only do it that way on computers because that's what we were taught based on the technology available at the time, and we've learned to force everything into a folder heirarchy by hook or by crook.

(Yes I know symlinks exist. If you use symlinks to organize your media, you shouldn't be on Ars Technica, you should be on alt.news.tech or something. Is usenet still even a thing?)

Libraries existed before computers were invented. They organised books in a hierarchical system. Because that's how you organise things. Sure, putting everything in a big pile can also be considered an organisational technique, but it does not scale very well...

Exactly, and home video libraries also existed for quite a long time - and I am pretty sure most people have developed their own way of organizing stuff by now. I have about 15TB of stuff, organized on my NAS first by type of show (anime or live action), then by movie or TV show, below that by year/month. Larger shows with lots of seasons get their own separate folder so that I do not have to hunt for the various seasons. It's not the most perfect system, but it works for me. Using a "library" system which tries to organize everything for you would just be an exercise in frustration - since my collection has developed over around 25 years, filenames are all over the place and not according to any "accepted" convention (because that's just how things were back then), some shows have seasons from various sources because that's all that was available, and so on. I tried letting Plex have a go, but the end results were laughable and utterly unusable. I do not plan on spending weeks trying to change everything (renaming files etc.). As it is, it works for me - and if a new media player does not let me use a simple file explorer interface, then I will just stay with mpchc or something like that.

 

[J.King]

I sure wish they would fix their SMB streaming on the Android version. It used to work fine, and then I guess they ripped it out and rewrote it, and the new version doesn't work at all for me. I've struggled and struggled with it, and ended up having to switch to NFS.

Basically, it's just horribly slow. It "works", in the sense that I can browse directories and click on movie files, but when it actually tries to play anything, I'm lucky to get even one frame rendered before it freezes. Most of the time it doesn't even manage one frame.

NFS is dismal by comparison. It works, after a fashion, but it takes about ten seconds for a stream to start, and then trying to fast forward or reverse is excruciatingly slow. I'd sure like SMB back; it handled those things just fine.

Have you considered just going back to the old version VLC where that still worked on android then? that is the great benefit of android over apple. when stuff breaks you can revert to the old version without any issues until it is fixed...or just sit on the old version forever.

It's on an Android TV, and I don't have root, so I don't think I have any way to do that?

Can you not install arbitrary APKs downded from the Web on Android TV? There's a complete archive on the VideoLAN servers.

 

[Degats]

First, excellent props for separating the controls from the playback window; this has been long needed for those of us (like me) who use VLC all the time for live presentation to classes and audiences. You've got to assume people have multiple monitors or devices these days.

Preferences > All > Video > Deselect "Embedded video".

This will spawn the video in a separate window (with window decorations etc.)

Farther down the same screen, you can disable window decorations and specify *exactly* where the video renderer will appear and what size if you want to.

 

[mikecee]

BTW, for any of my fellow Linux froods who are always like "why is snap even a thing"... checking this out using the snap was pretty awesome, and knowing I can get rid of it without bunging up my system just as easily as I installed it is even better.

Then again, I can't access any of my ACTUAL media with the snap, because the snap only has access to a few specific directories, not including /data where all my media is stored beneath, so that was fun...

I'm not a snap fan, but it would be less obnoxious if snaps could at least have default general read-only access (maybe requiring a simple confirmation at install time). I see a lot of complaints on Linux forums about various snap-installed media players not being able to access files.
I know the restricted access is intended to improve security, but I think the snap model seems to go too far in that direction for very little gain.

 

[Uncanny Valley]

QuickTime for Windows

Whoa! Flashback to 1998!

I still have to scold coworkers who install it on newer machines precisely for this feature.

 

[chaos215bar2]

Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

It got overpowered by "volunteer devs/designers for open-source projects will work on whatever interests them, not necessarily what their users want."

You know, I'd really appreciate it if some day one of these designers took it upon themselves to explain what on Earth they're thinking.

My general assumption is that when essentially everyone is doing something that just seems ridiculous on its face, the problem must be me. But from the comments here, it clearly isn't just me. And while this is a pretty egregious example, VLC 4.0 is hardly the only interface taking this general design direction.

I'd really like to at least understand why so much of modern UI design seems so bad, beyond the obvious designing for the lowest common denominator while ignoring power users. That just isn't a sufficient explanation.

 

[designinca]

First, excellent props for separating the controls from the playback window; this has been long needed for those of us (like me) who use VLC all the time for live presentation to classes and audiences. You've got to assume people have multiple monitors or devices these days.

Preferences > All > Video > Deselect "Embedded video".

This will spawn the video in a separate window (with window decorations etc.)

Farther down the same screen, you can disable window decorations and specify *exactly* where the video renderer will appear and what size if you want to.

Thanks! Well, that's one thing off the wish list. Very, very useful.

 

[Brisse]

Don't get me wrong, VLC is great, but I suspect a lot of people use it only as a media player and they do it because it supports a wide range of codecs and containers, and VLC has this reputation as the swiss army knife of media players. VLC is so much more than just a media player and has a lot of features that most people will never use or perhaps even know about. There are other options that focuses simply on playback and are just as good at it as VLC. I mostly use GNOME Videos (aka. Totem) and mpv. The former uses the GStreamer framework and the latter ffmpeg so it will play basically anything that VLC does.

The new look seen in the article is probably far from what the developers intend to release. Pretty sure it's not supposed to open videos in a new window for one thing (not as default anyway). It's probably just a quirk of this being a nightly, and the video is probably intended to display where there's a cone and disk thumbnail in the main window.

 

[TigerAway]

Dear VLC, all I want is lightweight software that plays every conceivable video CODEC instantly when I double-click a file from Windows Explorer.

Explorer already has a useful view of my files. I don't need another layer on top of it. I also don't need to learn another program-specific view or abstraction.

Oh, and please give me undockable controls, so it will play nice with OBS and projection systems.

Thanks.

I agree. Why does VLC even need a UI?

VLC doesn’t need to be XBMC.