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

   1 Title: Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu, video, web, multimedia
   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 the failure
  10 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
  11 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
  12 just hangs.  The 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.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
  19 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
  20 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
  21 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
  22 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
  23 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
  24 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
  25
  26 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
  27 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
  28 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
  29 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
  30 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
  31 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
  32 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
  33 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
  34 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
  35 what is going on.</p>