The VLC GUI is sort of a mess. I think it's QT but many QT applications look just fine in Gnome. VLC doesn't. The keyboard shortcuts sometimes work, sometimes they don't: obviously a focus thing or something. The looks is different and somehow old. Various widgets aren't standard and don't always work in a standard way. For some damn reason, VLC toggles the state of the super key which I use for many keyboard shortcuts, and this means typing text doesn't work if VLC is running. Moving back and forth is cumbersome: you just can't use the arrow keys but you have to use shift and or ctrl/alt. Those can theoretically be configured but my VLC hasn't believed my new keybindings for years. The popup menus flicker when opened during a movie and they can go really deep. Changing some settings in mid-play causes restarting the movie from beginning while some settings are lost after switching DVD titles/chapters.
There's undoubtedly a lot of functionality in VLC but I kind of prefer the way of the Gnome school: things should be simple by default, and advanced configuration can be arranged in some advanced way, if needed. For example, transcoding into a file could be just a "Save as..." with a simple selection of formats. Now it opens a complex dialog with several tabs all over. Using that monster I don't always manage to reliably produce transcoded video files with VLC that generally open in any other player, and at least I know something about video encoding and container formats. Even opening a DVD disk requires clicking through a dialog whereas Totem just... well, starts playing whatever disk happens to be in the drive.
On the other hand, the quality and robustness of VLC is outstanding.
A simple, Gnome compliant GUI plugin for vlc would make it a true pleasure.
I'm at 1.1.12 that came with Ubuntu. These problems have been around for years: I'm glad they're fixed now (obviously in 1.1.13?) but I must say they apparently weren't a priority for the VLC developers.
I'm glad to hear that the keyboard shortcuts have been fixed, too. The super/Windows key problem was particularly nasty: you couldn't leave VLC running on the background if you wanted to use other programs.
This apparently means that as of 1.1.13, I can configure away the braindead movement keybindings. By default, I have to keep shift and/or ctrl pressed to jump around the movie. Plain left/right do what? Go to a mysterious Next/Prev or something? What's that and who uses that? Totem got the keyboard controls right here, unfortunately. Totem doesn't even need the modifier keys because right is a bigger jump forward than left is backward, so you can just use two keys to jiggle yourself to the right position.
The flickering popup menus can be reproed like this: play a movie (a dvd preferably), go fullscreen, right-click on the screen and try to navigate to some other DVD title or chapter. This involves a lot deep submenus and they flicker frantically while the movie is playing. Not a biggie but this has been there forever, too, and gives a shoddy impression of the user interface that adds up.
