Last week, we mentioned that the hugely popular open source video player VLC will get a brand new interface in the upcoming 4.0 version, which is expected to debut later this year. VLC 4.0 is not ready for prime use yet – but because the program is open source, adventurous users can use its night work to get a glimpse of what’s to come. The screenshots we are about to show come from the nightly version released last Friday – 20210212-0431.
Goodbye file opener, hello media jukebox
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On the left we have the version of VLC that works with Ubuntu Focal – 3.0.9.2. On the right we see version 4.0.0-dev, currently on February 12th.
Jim Salter
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The old VLC offered users a blank media player when opened – the new version gives you a file browser version in the user’s videos.
Jim Salter
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The old version opens videos directly in the main window – the new version has a separate playback window that is not directly linked to the control interface.
Jim Salter
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The Browse page is intended to provide easy access to media servers in your local area network – Plex servers, Playstations and possibly other things that do not start with P.
Jim Salter
When you open the 4.0 dev version of VLC, the first change that pops up is an interface shift from ‘File Opener’ to ‘Media Browser’. In older versions of VLC – from its inception in 2001, through the 3.x version now distributed – it opens to an empty player window, with VLC’s iconic traffic cone in the middle. The new VLC opens instead of a media browser interface, which shows thumbnails of all videos in the user’s Video folder.
This is the view associated with the video view displayed next to the top menu bar of the new version; it also offers music, browse and discover. Music provides a similar look at the user’s music folder, Discover provides a network browser that searches for shares and streams found on the user’s LAN, and it appears that Discover has not yet been fully implemented.
Another big change is not clear before you open a video. In older versions of VLC, a single window provided both the video content and its controls. Instead, VLC 4.0 creates a new player window, separate from the browse / control window from which the video was selected.
File system? Which file system? There are only files
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If you want to find a video outside your videos directory, use the hamburger menu to look like a remnant of the old interface.
Jim Salter
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In this look at the Music view we can see that the interface of VLC 4.0 makes it very difficult to even find the filename of a file you have already opened.
Jim Salter
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Accessing controls in full screen mode is not much fun yet – we had to right-click on the screen for a sequel, which is technically not part of the player window at all.
Jim Salter
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The interface front screen has an option to show the operating functions in full screen mode – it appears to be a 3.x hold and does nothing at the moment.
Jim Salter
As long as your videos are all in your local video folder, you’ll probably not have problems with the new interface – but in the current state it’s not very fun to browse a large number of files in multiple folders. If you did not want to get out of your Videos directory, click on the hamburger menu at the top left of the playlist and choose Media> Open Directory. Unfortunately, selecting Open Directory does not take you to the new directory – it scans all files within and below the new directory you select and adds them all, willy-nilly, to the Video tab itself.
This folder scanned by the folder and updated by the browser is very reminiscent of the “Movies” interface of the Kodi media player – in theory it completely eliminates the inconvenience of managing folders and files, giving you a single level of glass gives to see all your content. But it does not fit too many use cases – I do not necessarily have to want to see all the dumb memes I downloaded and video clips I recorded with my webcam while watching movies, or vice versa.
The Kodi media player retains edit a “Files” interface for those who want to view their content according to the directory, but as far as we can see, VLC 4.0 has retained no way to get to the old file-based interface new version.
It is also difficult to find the file name or location of the media already in your library. You can not do this at all from the library view itself, but while playing a specific item, you can right-click, select Tools and then select Media Info.
Did we mention that this is a work in progress?
The current version of VLC 4.0.0-dev is not suitable for many of the use cases that were earlier versions of VLC, but it is not yet clear how much it is designed and how much it is because the new version is simply not yet not finished.
VLC 4.0 has been in development for about two years now; it was first announced at FOSDEM in February 2019, with early evening buildings to be available to the public in the same month. President Jean-Baptiste Kempf, founder of VideoLAN, told Protocol that 4.0 will be released sometime in 2021 – but there is no concrete release date yet.