I mean, it is user-friendly in some ways, depending how you define that.
Double-click a video and it opens. You get a visually appealing, sleek and minimalistic UI that helpfully appears only when your mouse is over the video, and otherwise gets out of the way. You can seek, adjust volume, select audio language and subtitles, and that’s it. Very uncluttered, obvious and easy in the way that modern applications try to be.
For most usage, that’s enough. It’s when you find yourself needing to pan/scan, or change subtitle offset, or enable looping etc you discover there are no buttons or menus for those things and you have to go hit the docs to discover what the keybinds are.
We can’t simply say minimalism is bad, though, because the truth is “it depends”.
The iPod Shuffle music player from the mid 2000s could be considered a minimalistic design. It had no screen, with only buttons for next, previous, play, pause, volume and (as the name suggests) shuffle. The player had far less functionality than its big brother iPods, but because it had less functions, the interface didn’t need many buttons.
It was, perhaps, “truly” minimal.
In software we do sometimes have true minimalism, but more often than not we actually have a lot of features, but have to choose to hide some amount of it and have a simpler interface, and the amount we choose to show or hide may determine how “minimalist” or not it appears.
So you can have minimalism via simply /not having/ functions, or you can have minimalism via hiding.
When you open a CAD program for the first time, you are likely immediately intimidated by the sheer number of buttons and toolbars, with no idea what to press. But a minimalist CAD program would be a nightmare because it ruins any discoverability of features. Showing the complexity is necessary.
On the other hand, an image viewer which is secretly also a featureful image editor - but hides all the edit controls behind an ‘edit’ button until you ask for them - is perhaps an appropriate time to hide it.
To look at mpv specifically, my personal opinion is that the lack of any option toolbars is ‘bad’ minimalism because it forces you to the wiki to find out how to do things with keybinds, but the main interface is ‘good’ minimalism because it shows you the controls you need probably 95% of the time, and nothing extra beyond that.
Both are good tools for the job. I use mpv but VLC just works for 99% of use cases. mpv is best for working with terminals, vlc is best for GUI and is consistently easy on any operating system, even android.
mpv is better
Yep, to me, simply because it can be color managed. Just because VLC will play anything, doesn’t mean it’ll play it well.
… go on
Faster, simpler but not user friendly.
What’s the point of simplicity if it’s not for user-friendliness?
Measuring epeen mostly.
Depends on your usecase. It’s user friendly if all you care about is playing a video, but not if you want to push it further.
I mean, it is user-friendly in some ways, depending how you define that.
Double-click a video and it opens. You get a visually appealing, sleek and minimalistic UI that helpfully appears only when your mouse is over the video, and otherwise gets out of the way. You can seek, adjust volume, select audio language and subtitles, and that’s it. Very uncluttered, obvious and easy in the way that modern applications try to be.
For most usage, that’s enough. It’s when you find yourself needing to pan/scan, or change subtitle offset, or enable looping etc you discover there are no buttons or menus for those things and you have to go hit the docs to discover what the keybinds are.
Minimalism rarely is ever user friendly is the problem.
Minimalism has the assumption the user preknows how to do everything.
User friendlyness is how you end up with button gore. It’s why UI/UX is so hard to do well.
We can’t simply say minimalism is bad, though, because the truth is “it depends”.
The iPod Shuffle music player from the mid 2000s could be considered a minimalistic design. It had no screen, with only buttons for next, previous, play, pause, volume and (as the name suggests) shuffle. The player had far less functionality than its big brother iPods, but because it had less functions, the interface didn’t need many buttons.
It was, perhaps, “truly” minimal.
In software we do sometimes have true minimalism, but more often than not we actually have a lot of features, but have to choose to hide some amount of it and have a simpler interface, and the amount we choose to show or hide may determine how “minimalist” or not it appears.
So you can have minimalism via simply /not having/ functions, or you can have minimalism via hiding.
When you open a CAD program for the first time, you are likely immediately intimidated by the sheer number of buttons and toolbars, with no idea what to press. But a minimalist CAD program would be a nightmare because it ruins any discoverability of features. Showing the complexity is necessary.
On the other hand, an image viewer which is secretly also a featureful image editor - but hides all the edit controls behind an ‘edit’ button until you ask for them - is perhaps an appropriate time to hide it.
To look at mpv specifically, my personal opinion is that the lack of any option toolbars is ‘bad’ minimalism because it forces you to the wiki to find out how to do things with keybinds, but the main interface is ‘good’ minimalism because it shows you the controls you need probably 95% of the time, and nothing extra beyond that.
Both are good tools for the job. I use mpv but VLC just works for 99% of use cases. mpv is best for working with terminals, vlc is best for GUI and is consistently easy on any operating system, even android.
Don’t they both use ffmpeg so their codecs support is exactly the same?