This is an old interview that resurfaces lately (no idea why), and it was done by a HR company, and they did a lot of cuts. So, it is far from being technically accurate, and some parts are quite weird.
Clearly not for the HN crowd, tbh.
I dislike those kind of interviews, because they focus on one person (people-isation trend that we see also in startups) while VLC was done by a collective.
It is sure that I'm the person that spent the most time on VLC and other VideoLAN projects than anyone else, but the work is a collective one.
Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.
I think people will understand, if they read the article, that VLC is not a one-person project. You make it pretty clear in the interview.
VLC is one of the biggest open source projects _ever_. For it to maintain its quality over 18 years(!), it needs a leader with a vision and integrity. If it wasn't for an interview like this, people wouldn't know about the collective work that's happening behind the scenes. It's kind of a "necessary evil" to have a single person exposed to the media. And I'm pretty sure that VLC would have either died, been sold, or turned into adware if it wasn't for you.
So I think it's a benefit overall to have you as the sole focus.
I know right? So many good projects have failed to maintain their integrity and changed for the worst. It’s hard to trust software these days but there are exceptions and VLC is one of them.
I'm looking at you Whatsapp. The founders clearly lied in the manifesto and sold their soul to Facebook which Zuckerberg was more than happy to take advantage of.
It didn't help that at some point on of the main distribution points for FOSS shipped archives stuffed with malware that the authors had no idea about.
Yeah, I used to place some trust in programs under certain licenses, or downloaded from that place. Now the license is a hard requirement and so is not being from that place.
Just wanted to throw in my appreciation for VLC and the team behind it. I just realized after this, that I've been using VLC for more than half my life at this point. It's always one of the first things I install on a new system or phone. Thanks for all the hard work over the years from you and everybody that's worked on VLC.
> Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.
Thank you for your integrity. You walked away from enough money to retire on, out of a principled commitment to free quality software. That deserves a lot of respect.
Hi Jean-Baptiste,
I remember we met in Munich about 10 years ago, at a Qt conference, and had a little chat. Was nice meeting you there, "l'eau a coulé sous les ponts depuis" like we say, I'm glad you stayed true with your values since.
Do you need any support with the website? as a front-end dev it's all I could contribute. I don't mean bells and whistles, just cleaning things up, making stuff consistent, improving galleries and that sort of thing. I've been using VLC for as long as I can remember so would be nice to give something back.
How can I get in touch to help with the main site? The VueJS front-end is something I'd be interested in helping with too. React background wrt web apps but happy to dive in.
You guys (I mean people who write free open software in general) are inspiration for me! Not only for me, I feel like many people appreciate FOSS but don't speak up about it often..
I have a collection of subtitled videos from several years ago. When I obtained them, I watched them in VLC with no problems.
A year or two ago, I had the urge to watch them again, and I wasn't able to use VLC, because it could no longer display the subtitles correctly. This prompted me to start using mpv instead of VLC, for pretty much everything. But I'm still confused at how VLC could have lost the ability to play files it once handled perfectly.
I liked the interview. Particularly the parts about maintainability / modularity, and hiring developers. Are any parts of that inaccurate, or do you (still) stand behind them? Are there any interviews / documents where you elaborate on those topics?
Can I throw in my sincere thanks for VLC. Back in the early 00s a media player that - gasp - actually played videos versus 'visualisations' or printing messages requiring you to install codecs was a rare and welcome thing! And still is !
I am really happy of the video, so I shared it on linkedin ... The most important part for me is when you spoke about creativity and knowing the web stack in order to be a good web dev. That has to be said, even if there cuts...
I've not used it in a while (or anything similar). But I relied on VLC heavily in the past and it was a godsend. I can't thank you enough for your efforts and your integrity - you are the real MVP
What I don't like about it is how anti-money it is... for apparently no reason.
For example, he said he doesn't want to work on it full time because then he would burn out. His solution is to get a job not working on VLC and then just work on VLC full time.
But that just shifts the burn out to his official employer.
The main challenge is that most OSS companies don't have healthy revenue models for building B2C apps like VLC.
Customers refuse to pay which is why you see companies like Facebook that make the consumer the product.
If you have two products that do the same thing. A and B.
A respects your privacy and charges you $1.99 per month.
B sells your data and is free.
... the customers will all block to B and A will stagnate or just outright die.
When i was much younger, my friends and I use to joke that you could take a handful of mud, put it in the CD tray, and VLC would open and play the file. Thank you so much VLC team for all you have contributed (and continue to contribute)!
Anybody who has every known the pain of running RealPlayer, knows what a Godsend VLC was. A free player that just works and is simple to use, it put those companies that didn't truly offer anything on ice.
I don't think a lot of younger folks appreciate the pain we had to go through back in the day to just play a video file on a Windows 95 PC. There were a handful of media players out there and each would only play 1-2 formats... poorly. Want to play AVIs? Windows Media Player. Want to play QuickTime files? Gotta go get QuickTime. Want to play Real format? Download RealPlayer.
So if you downloaded a random video from the web and want to play it, you need to figure out what player you need to get in order to play it. Back then, a lot of stuff from the web was garbage, corrupted data, named incorrectly, .mpg files that were actually AVI format, etc. So once you found the right player, you had to worry about whether it would play properly with your PC's video card. There were flaky video cards and not all manufacturers had drivers that worked. Then, if the downloaded file was corrupted in any way, chances are the official player would throw its hands up and refuse to play it. Then, once you actually found the right player and verified that it could play the file back, you were still stuck with that player's horrible UI and feature set.
There were brave souls who would download these "codec packs" from super-shady web sites, to act as plug-ins to Windows Media Player, since Microsoft couldn't manage to ship working video playback out of the box for anything but AVI. God knows what else those codec pack installers put on your system.
And reliably playing video directly in your browser? LOL, that would be for another 10 years or so with YouTube.
VLC was a huge breath of fresh air! Maybe it's not so vital now, since proper video playback is "table stakes" on any platform. You can play any video now with one line of Python, right? But we did sorely need it decades ago.
I used to get the K-Lite Codec Pack Mega and any video would play in any player ... haven't used it in many many years though, not sure if it is loaded with spyware nowadays. But yeah VLC is still great.
I have a question that is more likely to be answered here and now than at any other opportunity I've had before-
For a long while now, VLMC has been a work-in-progress. It is a video editor being made by the same organization as VLC. I've been eagerly anticipating having this as a free/open source video editing tool that I can trust will be available in the long term.
I haven't seen any evidence that it isn't vaporware in a long time. So to those in the know- when can we expect to see VLMC finished?
That's a real shame because there are lots of people who would really like to see a good open source video editor. Blender's built-in NLE works but it isn't as well-developed as VLMC could be (it's not the main focus of a 3D modeling program). I think Natron lost its main developer around that time as well. It's as if we almost had a broad revolution in open source video editing, but it petered out before hitting 1.0.
I don't understand the "When a mistake becomes a genius move" part... cool that is was a mistake, but I feel like there's missing something, how was this mistake made? What was the mistake?
OK, there are a few things that were done in VLC for reasons that could be puzzling or had unintended excellent consequences. Those are not really mistakes, per se.
I can speak about 3 of them:
1) the one mentioned in the interview, where, when VLC was ported to Windows and Mac OS X, instead of using the system codecs, they used the linux-way and bundled the dependencies. It was supposed to be temporary, and we would use the system codecs. This means that we control better our decoders and demuxers than other traditional players, and we did not require codec-pack. That became very popular for VLC.
2) The cone was a temporary icon (and a student joke), and it is sooooo weird for a player, that this became a huge brand because it is so recognizable.
3) The code was split in a lot of modules, to help speed up the compilation time, of the project. That made the code way easier to extend or port to other platforms. Indeed, for example, a lot of modules don't need a lot of maintenance, because they just work. And you can add features or new OS, without understanding the core.
There are 2 other technical reasons that helped VLC getting popular, but those were planned.
>The cone ... became a huge brand because it is so recognizable.
This is definitely the case, VLC isn't a very memorable name, but the icon is unique. I was searching the other day and after typing "traffic cone", one of the search suggestions was "traffic cone video player".
Do you know how Media Player Classic solved the same problem?
I definitely remember the struggle with codec packs, then a breth of fresh air when ffmpeg codecs would solve most formats, and then just like that forgetting all codec issues by using MPC.
Media Player Classic usually came in the same installer as a bundle of codecs (like K-Lite), so you likely installed the two at once, but the model is still different from VLC, in that the codecs get independently installed into the system media framework, not embedded in the player.
Without the cone we can't have the Santa hat cone, either. Another reason to keep the cone.
My little girl has grown-up seeing the cone on our PCs and knows it's what plays the videos from my DSLR. She has asked to watch "cone videos", which means "videos of me you shot with your camera".
> It was the fact that it came from the Linux world. So, when porting to Windows/macOS, the codec packages were part of the binary. It was supposed to temporary.
I think he refers to the fact that by porting VLC to Windows they had to embed all the dependencies (codecs) into the final binary, which is coincidentally why VLC has gained so much popularity.
Yeah, seems like he forgot to finish writing that. I guess he statically linked the libraries when updating windows deps because he didn't know how to do it dynamically and that meant they were stuck shipping them all together? Is that even how that works (I don't really know C et al well).
I'm guessing here that the perceived mistake was that it was better to have a plugin based architecture where you can use all those codecs written by others.
As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. For instance, VLC still forces you to kill the process when it can't find all of the files in a playlist (if you deleted them from your desktop). When you restart the app, if you hit play you will have the same problem. This happens to me all the time. It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.
> As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it.
Good, you will be happy to know that we're redoing the UI for 4.0, to fix UX issues. And the issue you mentioned is fixed in last version and better fixed in 4.0.
> but there seems to be no interest.
That is totally not true. We listen a lot to user feedback, but we are understaffed compared to the project size. It is getting better, and the biggest issues (like the one you mentioned) are all getting fixed.
I only made the comment about the lack of interest because of how long these issues have existed, and I certainly don't think any of us are entitled to a better UI if it's not a priority at the moment. You guys have my utmost respect for your efforts and I'm happy to hear some of the noted improvements are also high on my list of wants.
Comments like these are a good illustration why work on open source projects is such an ungrateful task. Yes, you have a point, and I'm sure all your gripes are accurate. But in spite of all of that you still got a product for free and who are you to determine that it wouldn't take much to address all those nitpick issues?
And yes, of course there is interest (see the answer to your comment), but resources are finite and many of these projects have a very small fraction of the budget of even the smallest commercial operation.
It also goes a long way to explaining why the leaders of so many open source projects are vulnerable when sleazy marketers come around waving life-changing amounts of money.
When one gets little help and support and it feels like ungrateful demands are the only thing anyone ever contributes, it's not hard to see why one might just take the money and ghost.
A moment of respect for what jbk personally passed up to keep VLC free for us.
I'd like to ungratefully demand that jbk take the money offered in exchange for putting malware in the Windows installer and then spend said money hiring developers to make the Linux experience better. It's a nuanced, centrist ungrateful demand.
While I don't exactly contribute to open source at the moment, I do provide tools for various communities I'm in. I take feedback and critiques very seriously and do my best to understand what my community really wants. I think my tone might have come off a bit strong, but my frustration is more out of love for the product. I don't think the UI needs a ton a polish, but if they focused on some nagging issues (that don't appear to need complex fixes), the experience would be substantially better.
> It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.
Comments like these never fail to bring a smile to my face. Someone who doesn't understand the project / issue decides it is easy and people should care about their personal grievances for a program they have not paid a single cent for
You seriously think that adding some checks to account for missing files in a playlist is a hard thing? I know it's probably a bit more involved than that, but lets be serious here. I'm not asking for much. I do think making the assumption that they don't care about this stuff was not exactly the tone I was looking for, but I do think some obvious UI issues have taken a back seat.
Just because it's an OSS project does not mean it's beyond reproach. I contribute free software myself and never once felt that I was above my users. I don't think the VLC guys are this way one bit, but your suggestion that I should not be talking about any of my minor gripes is ridiculous.
I contribute to free software. When a user asks me to change something, most of the time I am quite happy to do that. Sometimes a user asks me to change something, with the message that it is easy and won't take much time. Those requests get instantly put on the backburner, and maybe a year later I start working on them. It really irks me the wrong way.
Just an analogy... Suppose on a nice summer sunday afternoon, you are walking or cycling on the country side. You come past a farm, and they have free apples on the side of the road that you can take with you. You pick one, but find that there is a bad spot on that apple. First thing you do is throw it against the front wall of the farm. The farmer comes outside and you tell him he should be more carefull in picking apples, it is easy to do that and won't take much time. Next week you are there again, and there are no free apples anymore.
VLC has minor issues (though it’s MacOS support has gotten much better over the years) - but as far as FOSS software goes it has among the best UI/UX along with FireFox.
I’d say there seems to be far less interest in improving, in particular, the UX (not even UI, but UX specifically) of usability disasters like Gimp or Blender.
sigh - this might sound tough to say, but, I’m not ready to give Blender another shot.
I’m hardly ready to give Gimp another shot - I doubt, at this point, either of these releases will phase me or my use - I’ve simply been too disappointed with them both for more than 15 years of trying every new version, that they would probably literally need a new name to get me to use them.
I get a bad taste in my mouth when I think about Gimp or Blender - I unfortunately only have terrible memories of frustratingly trying to do basic tasks like make a selection or move an object around, to the point where I hear the word ‘Blender’ like I’d hear the word ‘Wasp’ - a little cringe of bad memories and something to be avoided.
I think it’s been almost 18 years of trying Gimp on a yearly basis on multiple platforms only to be baffled how rudimentary user-level functions are so fundamentally broken.
It must sound like I’m really bashing this software, and I’m not - I am appreciative of everyone who puts an effort into the important and often thankless work of FOSS - but part of the point of the FOSS movement is to demonstrate its feasibility to replace the equivalent paid software. This is also critical to its growth, evolution, and support. Firefox, VLC, and, to an extent, OpenOffice, have achieved this tremendously.
Due to the overwhelming complexity of the tasks it sets to achieve, Blender’s usability atrocities can be pushed aside. Not so with Gimp.
OpenOffice, for example, is somewhere in the middle, but both ways - the functionality and the UI/UX are both ‘good enough’, and I can hand it to my Grandma instead of Word and she will hardly notice.
I think the major point for me here, is that this is why there’s an age old saying that FOSS is made by geeks, for geeks, and we will never have ‘the year of Linux’.
That’s because usability these days is basically on par with functionality, because with so many frameworks and software options available, even if something half-works - people will still prefer the half working, usable thing, to something that works great and literally seems to change its mind on what function does what depending on some extremely random-seeming context.
Photoshop’s UI/UX is shit to start. I’ve often stated it’s a piece of software you must have someone basically show you the first time how to use - then it’s okay. That we have only this to really compare Gimp’s state of awfulness to, indicates, unfortunately, the depth of the shithole Gimp’s UX is really in.
I’m a UI/UX dev, and I find these pieces of software unusable, and, perhaps especially due to my education on the subject, actively frustrating to try to use - I pray to think what would happen if I gave, let’s say, my girlfriend, who does Photography and Graphic design, a copy of Gimp to replace Photoshop. She’d probably leave me for even putting her through the experience. /s
Again, though, OpenOffice vs. Word? No problem.
tl;dr:
Usability has to go hand in hand with functionality in development, or there is a risk in the brand simply becoming a ‘bad name.’
If Gimp 3 might actually be usable, I’d personally go for a name change. I see people in IT visibly cringe when I mention it.
It's totally subjective of course, but I really like the lack of UI polish in VLC. To me it makes it feel like a real, powerful tool. Clearly the process killing thing is a straight up bug that should be fixed, but I do hope VLC retains its utilitarian aesthetic.
I'm not the parent commenter, but I'll take a crack it at. Some of the mpd and similar command line utilities (as well as those that get a little more flashy like ncmpd or another front end) are usually pretty simple and low resource. VLC can do everything, which makes it a gigantic swiss army knife chainsaw thing, but most of the time I can get away with something lighter.
That said, VLC is still pretty good. It handles the various webm, mkv, mp3, mp4, plus whatever else I've got floating around in /home without losing a beat.
I guess, with how powerful it is, and how small of a bundle it is, I’ve never had any reason not to use it.
I’ve never opened media files from a command line, personally.
The ‘Swiss army knife’ approach is why I love VLC - the knowledge I can throw literally any file at it and it will just open is very satisfying. iTunes/QuickTime just don’t make that cut, even with Perian. (is that still a thing?)
The story of all idealistic open source software, same with Gimp, which is unusable for professional work. Them using the word "beautiful" to describe a well designed UI is telling and it really is an attitude problem among programmers.
100,000 hours spent on programming the underlying features, 0 hours on actually making it usable.
No, before GimpShop, I’d argue Gimp has had the worst native UI/UX I’ve used next to Blender, and I mostly do UI/UX for a living.
Bizarre keyboard shortcuts, awful ‘stay-on-top’ window behaviour when tabbing between applications. ‘Copy’ copies the inversion of the selection by default. Dragging a selection drags the rest of the image. The default behaviour of most tools is inverse to any previously established behaviour.
I’ve used Gimp thousands of times over 15-some years, in some cases for professional projects, and under the hood it is very good, but for many years it’s UI/UX made it literally the most bottom rung tool I would possibly choose to use for graphics manipulation - only when I absolutely had to. (I remember using Gimp in between the PowerPC -> Intel transition, where CS2’s performance on my Intel Mac Pro was worse than my iBook, and Gimp had a Universal Binary before Adobe did...)
I learned GIMP, through tooth and nail, and, knowing it well, I can still say through and through, especially historically, Gimp has been nothing short of a mess to use. I’m still not used to the idea that selecting and dragging something moves the rest of the image, not the selection itself.
I don’t want to learn to make an exception for Gimp as opposed to every other graphics application on the planet I’ve used since MS Paint, and I am certainly not the only individual criticizing particularly the glaring UX issues within Gimp.
Now, Blender, I’ve tried to take a dozen or so YouTube tutorials, and read dozens of articles on, and it just makes me want to hurl my MacBook Pro across the room every time. I was never able to accomplish anything serious in Blender the way I did with Gimp, which is why I put Gimp as the second worst UI/UX I’ve ever tolerated.
I tend to learn high value software. At this point, there have been so darn many UX paradigms... OK fine.
Unless there is an actual use bug, like things do not work, for high value software, it pays to just work the thing the way it works.
All improvements welcome, of course. And the interesting there is I hope they are good, not just a pretty pass, or rearrange. That takes time to remap. It is nice when it is time well spent.
I tend to give a wide berth to high value tools I get to use gratis.
Funding good UX would be a huge step, I think, I personally pay my CC subscription, because I use PS every day constantly for my work, easily make far over and above the subscription cost using the software, and it’s useable - I unfortunately literally mean that Gimp makes me actively frustrated to use.
‘Selecting selects the opposite’, is, to me, a use bug, among with many other designers and developers (a quick Google search confirms this).
I wish I had the time myself to go in and look at it, I really do. I’m sure it’s the same for a few folks. I love and support FOSS and I wish I could get behind GIMP like I can VLC.
But VLC managed to make itself a daily driver, even from this interview’s description, by being usable.
Gimp isn’t usable unless I’m going to dedicate myself to it. Functionally, there’s no reason I can’t use it and Photoshop interchangeably for the same task.
But when that same task takes me two or three times longer because I’m fighting with the UX, and design time is money, Adobe can unfortunately take my money for now.
Yeah, but you know what it does. So deal and flow? That is precisely what I do.
Most of us have seen it all done a bazillion ways. I go all the way back to floppies, TV for a monitor and separate application and data disks.
Even a lame UI is presenting me with fast, potent tools!
If there is value there, the learning follows, then stuff gets done, next. It is hard the first few times. Easier after that. Almost no worry now. "How does this one do it?" K, next, done.
Hard to complain about pretty great tools I can use, modify, etc. for a song and small investment in how the tool works.
Or don't, right?
Adobe is happy for your money, and parting with it is worth more than some time sorting GIMP out.
This isn't necessarily about Gimp, but this is a general problem with software developers creating tools for their domain.
It is easy to create a tool that is specifically tailored to your workflow, because for parts that may tough to code, you manually take care of it. It becomes harder to generalize that tool for public use. It is harder still to add good UX that lets novices pick it up and begin working.
It seems easy, because the ubiquitous tools, libraries and frameworks have years of planning and experience to learn from.
That's some baseless assertions if ever there were any. Gimp, Inkscape, VLC, Blender. All open source, all used by enthusiasts and professionals all over the world. Maybe not in the same quantity as that of their open source counterparts, but used by enough people to be counted nonetheless. When it comes to VLC, I dare say, it might even beat its commercial counterparts.
In fact I've found that a lot of the professionals that refuse to go near the OS version are a hell of a lot less skilled than those that enjoy the benefits of the GPL'd versions.
Open Source apps are very popular in enterprise and professional circles.
Unrelated, I found this statement (probably a mis-quote by the journalist) amusing:
> Because it was done as a student project, it is a very modular program and it is very easy to add a new feature.
So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :)
> So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :)
Get a student who could be a really good software archidect create the foundation basically. I think it's a small amount of people who could do such things.
In my experience, skill at doing that usually comes from... experience. (and ideally experience in similar domains to what you are designing, not just software in general).
Certainly there are "students" with software engineering/architecture experience and/or natural amazing talent, but it's def not the first place I'd look!
I’ve mentioned this in other threads on music streaming, but VLC is the center of my music world. The feature that lets you spawn a web server from the mobile app to easily transfer files from a laptop is incredible, so easy that literally my grandma used it to put some old recordings on her phone (and knows VLC is the “recordings app”).
I want to pay music artists better for their work than what I can with streaming apps, and I also want my entire library available offline on all devices.
ok, I finally registered here to say this: thank you and the VLC team!
Also... the only feature that I always missed when playing music with VLC instead of winamp: Enqueue. Meaning: adding a music file that gets put in as the next song and not at the end (or played directly)... is such a thing planned at all? I can't be only one (actually, I haven't found a player that does this since winamp :( )
Yes, I have opened a ticket here: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22914#ticket
However, I think my first description here in the comments was not concrete enough. I don't think the (awesome) function from winamp is as trivial to add as it might have appeared :)
> we don’t have a marketing department or a management team of people who decide on a feature that is then pushed down to the users, as has been happening with RealPlayer and BS.Player. So, when we add a feature it’s because people actually need it and actually want it.
There is a clear distinction between software written with profit in mind and free software. Behind the first one often there are people with agendas, strong opinions and marketing departments. They keep breaking things and force me to change my habits to their likings. The second group however, is user-oriented with no marketing department. I used to dislike vlc and its ui. After many years of experiencing software that breaks and pushes to change me I learned to love vlc. Even if it looks different. I don't care about this anymore. Actually I've developed a liking for it, let it break the UI conformaty. It works and is a solid piece of software and this is just brilliant.
I wouldn't agree that the distinction is so clear, unfortunately. There are people with agendas on both sides. For-profit software obviously needs to make money, so whatever people are more likely to pay for is prioritized, even if it's not what a typical user wants the most. Developers of free software are often people with full-time jobs and limited free time, so whatever is more fun to work on and/or matches their skillset is prioritized, which, again, might not be that annoying bug that everybody wants fixed, but which would involve re-writing half the code. I am generalizing, of course: VLC is one of the counter-examples.
I agree that the distinction is not so clear; contrary to my statement. However, I think the distinction gets clearer over time. Nowadays, I try to prioratize agenda-free software over agenda-driven ones as much as possible.
I love VLC and use it daily, literally daily. I often donate to open source projects and VLC is one of those.
One gripe though is that VLC gives a such a good impression that you get very disappointed when basic things like scanning your media library don't work. It catches you by surprise because the rest of VLC is so polished.
And for example the fact that there was no sleep timer until recently.
You'd think that an open source project so widely used would find plenty of help to implement such basic features.
"For a patch to get accepted, it needs to be maintainable as well as useful [...]
Which means that we put a lot of emphasis on quality. So, with any code we get sent, we need to make sure that we can still maintain it in 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years… And that’s why we have a lot of features in VLC that some consider completely useless and why we don’t have others that some people think are important. It’s not because we’re stupid, it’s just that the code needs to be clean—if it’s not, you don’t get in."
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention one of my favorite features of VLC mobile.
The ease and breadth of the ways to get content onto your mobile device is outstanding.
You can browse a Plex server, SMB share, cloud service, FTP server, and even point your computer's web browser at the IP address of your mobile device and drag and drop files onto the device, along with other options.
I didn't watch the video but I read the interview.
If I could get everyone to take away five things from it they would be these.:
Keep everything as simple as possible, keep everything modular and as independent as possible, develop the features your users actually want and need, build on a solid base, and keep the maintainability of the project as a top priority.
This sounds like a gripe but it's really not - I'm immensely grateful for the ability to be able to play media in the product I work on.
Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away..
I know the developers on the forum must get tired of the "CAN PLS HELP ME MAKE VLC. THANKS" type posts but mine were always specific questions with working sample code which illustrates smy issue and that I'd banged my head on for days without success.
I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs.
> Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away..
It's hard and some devs are not very patient, tbh...
> I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs.
Also applies to many other projects really, it has a big enough of a barrier of entry people's patience isn't nearly as eroded as in say public forums (or SO).
VLC is an amazing tool. I almost wish it was the embedded video player for Chrome or Firefox. It would be nice to play more formats of video on the web and VLC does an amazing job supporting other formats. Also, there is no way to play RTSP on the web, which VLC does well.
Different family situations can surely impact how much time you have to do OSS. One partner might always be working on weekends whilst another is always free during the weekend.
Also if you get a divorce, you might not really be up to working on OSS for some time, which is probably part of changing wives. :P
Wow, why all the downvotes? The original article said "People change jobs, change wives, have kids, accidents, and so on. So everything in VLC needs to be done so that we can continue without you." I really don't get how "changing wives" fits here so was asking a legitamate question. And I got some legitamate answers too -- e.g. you might have had a wife that supported your volunteer coding financially or otherwise.
> There are about 500 modules in VLC, which means you can come and work on a very small part and improve it without breaking everything else.
This is presented as a positive. Here's the negative: poor maintenance. Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation.
Speaking about "best developers" (a section of the article). Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on. I'm talking about video playback, which is a core feature; I had to switch to MPlayer.
It seems to me that VLC is the software users love to love. I'm puzzled by the reasons of this; my guess is that products with a zillion of features have a certain charm.
> Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation.
Totally BS. We have 4 SMB modules, which ones are you talking about? (Windows, samba, libdsm (v1) and libsmb2). We spent a lot of time lately to fix that and improve it.
Sure, with the move to SMBv2/3 we had some issues, but that is normal because it required a new architecture, and they are almost all fixed now.
The documentation of those modules is at the same place as usual.
> Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on.
Since version 3, we activated hardware decoding by default, and that means it is very dependent on your linux distribution and your drivers. I think most of those issues are fixed now though.
This is an old interview that resurfaces lately (no idea why), and it was done by a HR company, and they did a lot of cuts. So, it is far from being technically accurate, and some parts are quite weird.
Clearly not for the HN crowd, tbh.
I dislike those kind of interviews, because they focus on one person (people-isation trend that we see also in startups) while VLC was done by a collective. It is sure that I'm the person that spent the most time on VLC and other VideoLAN projects than anyone else, but the work is a collective one.
Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.
(inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)