blog/data/2010-11-27-vlc-edu.txt

   1 Title: Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-11-27 11:30
   4
   5 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
   6 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
   7 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
   8 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
   9 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly failure
  10 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it pop up a error message reporting
  11 the problem.  When mplayer fail, it segfault or just hangs.  The
  12 latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
  13
  14 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
  15 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
  16 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
  17 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
  18 not very good.  It lack in-line control buttons, so there is no way
  19 for the user to pause the video.  If the browser plugin for VLC was as
  20 good as the gecko-mediaplayer package (which uses mplayer), we would
  21 switch.</P>
  22
  23 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
  24 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
  25 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
  26 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
  27 Space only work as pause when in full screen mode, for example.  I
  28 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
  29 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
  30 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
  31 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
  32 what is going on.</p>