I filed a bug report about something just like that many years ago (hanging in a CPU intensive loop if you remove all the files in the looping playlist out form under it, i.e. a disk drive goes offline or USB stick is unplugged), and he brushed it off and dismissed my bug report, telling me simply not to do that.
And I also took the time to file several other very detailed bug reports against the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom user interface, which is not only ugly and poorly designed from an ergonomic perspective, but actually drawn into the video at video resolution instead of being drawn in an overlay at full screen resolution, so it gets rotated and is unusable when you combine it with Video Effects / Transform / Rotate, because it fails to transform the mouse events the same as the video and user interface. He brushed that one off as working as designed, too. It's still just the same as it was many years ago when I filed that bug report.
I'm serious: Give it a try, you'll fall out of your seat laughing at how terrible it is! Check out the lowres pixelated font it uses to draw "VLC ZOOM HIDE" between the thumbnail and the bizarre curved zoom scale wedge! The mouse target area of the zoom wedge actually diminishes in size with the width of the wedge, until the minimum zoom target area is only one video pixel wide at the bottom, so it's almost impossible to click. (And it's totally impossible to click anywhere when the video is rotated or flipped, since the target area isn't correspondingly transformed.)
Yes, I know the drill: It's free software, so I should just download the source code, read it, figure out the problem, fix it myself, and post a pull request. But I don't feel spending my time doing that after the author of VLC won't even admit there's a problem.
> and he brushed it off and dismissed my bug report, telling me simply not to do that.
I did not do that. That's totally not true. You are confusing me with someone else.
And the bug is fixed.
> after the author of VLC won't even admit there's a problem.
There is no "the author of VLC". There are many persons, and some of them are nicer than others; but spitting on the project for that is not normal. If you have any bugreport that were closed while they should not (transform related), please mail me.
Here's the thread about "VLC's terrible "Magnification/Zoom" user interface" from July 27, 2014.
I posted a detailed message describing exactly what the problems were (there were MANY), specific and precise step by step instructions detailing exactly how to reproduce them, with references to Fitt's Law on wikipedia to support my points about usability.
You eventually replied "If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them..." to which I replied "if you did less arrogant responses to long posts, maybe people wouldn't give up on trying to help you." And then I gave up trying to help you. (Yet here we are, again! So why don't you give it another go, and acknowledge the problem, please?)
That's what I consider "brushing off", when you won't take the time to even read what I wrote, yet spent at least as much time arguing and telling me that you didn't read what I wrote and that I should do shorter posts, as it would have taken you to read what I wrote in the first place.
Do you not bother reading long detailed security bug reports too? Or only if they are very polite and complementary? If your skin is so thin that you deal with constructive input about security bugs the same way as you dealt with my report, then VLC users are in big trouble.
>[...] The terrible things about the design of the VLC magnification user interface are as follows: [...]
dfuhrmann>Sorry, but instead writing your really long post, you would better do fill a short and precise enchanchment request at your bug tracker for this issue. Actually, I stopped reading in the middle.
>Of course, I was planning on filing a lot of bugs.
>But of course I also want to discuss the bugs here FIRST, to give anybody who thinks so the chance to chime in that it's designed to work that way on purpose, or that they don't consider it a bug for some reason.
I gave a link to another thread where Jean-Baptiste Kempf brushed off another similar bug report, "hot key magnification. does it exist?" on Jun 12, 2012:
A user described the problem, and Jean-Baptiste replied smugly but incorrectly with the single character "z", and the user replied "Thanks for the response, Jean-Baptiste, but you did NOT read what I wrote."
He was never able to get you to listen to what he was saying or take him seriously, and you never followed up on his clarification. He finally said "Please read my original question again. Maybe you, too, are confused by the nomenclature. Zoom ("z") is NOT the same as magnification.".
That's what I call rudely brushing off and ignoring valid bug reports. And it worries me that this well established pattern might apply to security bugs, too.
And here are two about the much more terrible infinite loop problem:
Here's the "Infinite loop on playlist" one from March 5 2012, in which the developer Rémi Denis-Courmont brushed off the report with "That's not really a bug. VLC is doing what you told it to... The obvious solution would be to stop the playlist whenever an error occurs. But that would probably cause even more frustrations..."
Will you at least acknowledge my criticisms of the Video Effects user interface problems, please? Have there ever been any bug reports on that that you can remember? I'll try to dig that one up too.
While you're here, I'm really curious: What was the thinking behind the design of the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom interface? Why does it draw into the video instead of using an overlay? Why does the mouse target area of the zoom wedge diminish to be almost impossible to hit? Why doesn't it transform the mouse coordinates for the zoom controls when it rotates the video? Why that font for "VLC ZOOM HIDE"? I understand what "ZOOM" and "HIDE" do, but what is "VLC" for? Just to remind me I'm using VLC?
> Will you at least acknowledge my criticisms of the Video Effects user interface problems, please? Have there ever been any bug reports on that that you can remember? I'll try to dig that one up too.
Of course, the video filters UX and UI in VLC is really awful, but very hard to debug for now.
> What was the thinking behind the design of the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom interface?
It was a very old filter done for the time where you could use remotes through STB and where the filter was streamed.
> Why doesn't it transform the mouse coordinates for the zoom controls when it rotates the video?
Because rotation was done a long time after, and because rotation is applied at the end, so it can be done on the GPU, while the transform is done before.
All that is very buggy, sure. But it requires some core changes that we are doing now 4.0 to improve them quite a bit.
You really shouldn't accept features that don't work and allow "very buggy" yet only marginally useful untested features to exist in the code base for decades.
If a new feature breaks an existing feature, then don't accept it until the developer fixes the problem. And simply don't accept untested features with such tightly coupled interactions with so many different parts of the system.
If you let anybody who wants toss in willy nilly unreviewed random features that can all be enabled at once, but have never been tested against each other, then you're going to have a lot worse than user interface bugs: you're going to have security bugs.
The video effects interface clearly lets you enable them all at once, so they should have been tested together, and the bugs either fixed or the features rejected until they were.
I could also write a lot of bug reports about the spectacularly horrible Video Effects / Crop user interface (and how it interacts with rotations), as well as about why the shuffle button sometimes inexplicably turns on when you press the repeat button (it must be a Heizenbug since it's not doing it now, but I'm sure I've seen it do that many times, causing me to have to click again and again to get it back to how I wanted it). But I was discouraged after you brushed off my previous bug reports.
As it turns out, I already described a lot of the Video Effects user interface bug in great detail five years ago, but your reply brushed of what I said without acknowledging it, and literally discouraged me from writing detailed descriptions of bugs, how to reproduce them, and how they interact with each other: "If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them...".
I will point out that your very own signature quoted at the end says "If you want an answer to your question, just be specific and precise. Don't use Private Messages." I was being specific and precise, and not using private messages. That's why I'm being specific and precise and posting this publicly: Because you said so.
>There are many things about the "Video Effects" window that are terribly designed and implemented.
>Is it really supposed to randomly enable the effects when you change movies, some times remembering them from movie to movie, sometimes forgetting them, sometimes even remembering between invocations of VLC, and sometimes not?
>Is there some reason the "crop" dialog only lets you click on the arrows to change it from 0 to 100 pixels, but you can enter any number and it's not limited to the actual video size? And why the scale seems to be greater than pixels when cropping 90 degree rotated video? And that it's so incredibly hard to reset or change the numbers, resulting in pop-ups that scold you for entering a bad number, instead of helping you correct the error? Is there some reason the letters "px" follow the number, and it's an error to enter other letters or if you accidentally delete one of the letters? That "crop" dialog seems to be as user hostile and maliciously designed as the magnification dialog (although at least it is not drawn over the video in low resolution pixels -- even though it would be much easier to use than the four numeric fields, if that were the case and it were well designed).
>There are just so many problems with so many parts of the VLC user interface, that it's extremely hard to keep it down to "a couple of small paragraphs". Is there a back story about the design and implementation of those Video Effect dialogs, and why they are so terrible? Were they done by the same person? Or did many different people contribute to them, with no overall design or code review?
>Is there something about the Mac version of VLC that makes it fundamentally random and non-deterministic? Does the Windows version suffer from the same kind of unpredictability? (I only use the Mac version regularly.)
>[...] The reason it's so hard to enter a number, is that you have to select both the number and the "px" which is separated by a space, in order to delete them before typing the new number, and it's very easy to screw that up, because the field is so small, and double or triple clicking is so unreliable, and most of the time does not actually select both words, but one or the other, or part of each, so when you type a new number, it often still has the prefix of part of the previous number, or the suffix of part of the space followed by "px", so it is syntactically invalid, then the extremely obnoxious dialog pops up and scolds me for entering an invalid syntax, without actually doing anything to help correct the problem, as I already described.
>A single click simply sets the cursor position without selecting any of the text, so if you type a number, it will definitely be a syntax error.
>A double click selects either the number, or the "px", or the space between them, or most likely (since the area is the largest) double clicking in the space to the left of the number selects absolutely nothing and leaves the cursor before the number. So in most of those cases, typing a number will result in a syntax error, which leads to the punishment of the obnoxious dialog:
>"The value "0 px0 is invalid." Please provide a valid value. [Discard changes] [OK]" -- the escape key does NOT dismiss the dialog. The return key goes back to editing the field with the invalid value, and pressing return again pops up the same error message, so you have to type "cmd-a" to select all and then enter a correct value. Terrible user interface design.
>[...] "0px" is invalid. when you type "0 px", the space does not appear until you type the "p", which leads you to think it's ignoring the space even though it's not. If you're going to REQUIRE people to type a space between "0" and "px", then you should bloody well echo it when people enter it.
>The "px" suffix is totally useless. No, "10%" does not work. "10 %" does not work. "10 + 10" does not work. Nothing I can think of works. The " px" suffix is just useless decoration that does NOTHING useful but make it very easy to make a syntax error. [...]
Re: does vlc really have a zoom feature ?
Post by Jean-Baptiste Kempf » Wed Jul 30, 2014 10:06 pm
If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them...
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
http://www.jbkempf.com/ - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/category/Videolan
VLC media player developer, VideoLAN President and Sites administrator
If you want an answer to your question, just be specific and precise. Don't use Private Messages.
Your reply is self-contradictory. So which do you want: "shorter posts" or "specific and precise"?
As a bystander, I have not checked the earlier correspondence you mentioned, but this post comes off as quite excessively aggressive. If they were unfairly dismissive, that’s one thing, but you’re in no position to demand that they fix or improve anything in particular. If you’re dissatisfied with VLC in any way, you are eligible for a full refund of what you paid for it.
I once also thought that providing detailed descriptions of every possible issue after extensive context was clear communication. I have since learned that this is not at all true.
A very long post cannot be specific, and precision is lost in too much detail.
And I also took the time to file several other very detailed bug reports against the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom user interface, which is not only ugly and poorly designed from an ergonomic perspective, but actually drawn into the video at video resolution instead of being drawn in an overlay at full screen resolution, so it gets rotated and is unusable when you combine it with Video Effects / Transform / Rotate, because it fails to transform the mouse events the same as the video and user interface. He brushed that one off as working as designed, too. It's still just the same as it was many years ago when I filed that bug report.
I'm serious: Give it a try, you'll fall out of your seat laughing at how terrible it is! Check out the lowres pixelated font it uses to draw "VLC ZOOM HIDE" between the thumbnail and the bizarre curved zoom scale wedge! The mouse target area of the zoom wedge actually diminishes in size with the width of the wedge, until the minimum zoom target area is only one video pixel wide at the bottom, so it's almost impossible to click. (And it's totally impossible to click anywhere when the video is rotated or flipped, since the target area isn't correspondingly transformed.)
Yes, I know the drill: It's free software, so I should just download the source code, read it, figure out the problem, fix it myself, and post a pull request. But I don't feel spending my time doing that after the author of VLC won't even admit there's a problem.