New VLC upgrade leads to disapointment
Videolan media player has been a life-saver for digital video viewers. I’ve used it for a year or so now and since then I no longer had to one have to muck about with stupid ‘Kazzaa’ codec packs and other crappy codecs and players. Instead, all I had to do was download a reasonably sized media player and it would open any format I could throw at it. It was a blessing and it’s on my Windows desktop, my Ubuntu Laptop and my workplace Mac. It’s never let me down, it’s fast and it ‘just works’ ™.
So now I’m obviously quite sad having downloaded the latest new version (0.9.2) which has had substantial changes. There is a new, ‘shinier’ (read: more messy) interface, bug fixes, support for even more codecs and oh yeah, now when I skip forward through video too fast it crashes. The old VLC never crashed. Never. I recommended it to everyone who just needed a video open now, but I don’t think I can do so anymore. Fingers crossed they fix it, but for now I’ll be downgrading and I think it’s another case of shine-over stability.