</description>
</item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
+presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
+Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
+to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
+gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
+model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
+reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
+just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
+
+<p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
+mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
+Edu/Skolelinux</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
+plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
+not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
+is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
+tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
+failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
+the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
+package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
+
+<p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
+annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
+keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
+shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
+For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
+wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
+window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
+the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
+web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
+what is going on.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
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