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Is MC genuinely usable for video on linux?

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mattkhan:
I've had MC installed on various linux machines for a long time, it generally works fine for audio but was historically not so good at video & the UX was not one your average user seems likely to put up with (aka family). I retried it again the other day and it's still a really bad time in a few ways. I don't see these points mentioned commonly though so are people just used to them or is there something about what I run MC on that means it's my problem?

From a general UX point of view,  the almost always wrong z index is the main problem. This makes for such a confusing experience, a few examples

* file open dialog (e.g. open media file) => always hidden behind the main window
* click in the search box, start typing => anything you type is ignored because focus has been stolen by the "type to start searching" tooltip which means you really have to click twice twice before typing
* surprisingly/unpredictable child window interaction, e.g. open dsp studio, open options, have dsp studio on top, press esc to close it, options closes instead

basically it seems like there is something fundamentally broken in how UI elements are handled and interact with each other and the desktop/window manager.

Secondly, and more seriously for using MC for video playback, it seems rather unreliable. I'm running as a client to a windows server (due the lack of support for "playback from local file") and played a bluray (so it converts to some format and streams to client over a wired network). I attempted to seek a few times via either dragging the position slider or by keyboard arrow back and forth, this produces 1 hard freeze (force kill MC) and 2 crashes. There's also a particular ugly behaviour when seeking as it appears to freeze (pauses the display, a white bar appears where the lower OSD should be) so it seems like the UI is blocked while it is working out how to seek then only continues drawing once that is resolved & finally moving the mouse so as to get the top OSD to appear behaved extremely irregularly (frequently not able to get the top OSD to appear at all).

This is on "normal" commodity hardware which runs linux fine rather than some tiny/custom PC.

Is it just me or is this normal behaviour for MX on linux?

JimH:
Which Linux?  Which desktop?  Version of MC?

Hendrik:
Can't comment on the UI issues, thats for bob.

As for seeking with conversion, thats not a well optimized path to use to be honest. It was built for DirectShow and some special conditions put into place, and I'm not sure if those are all accounted for when doing this in the cross-platform video engine. The difficulty here is that basically you are not seeking on the client, but on the server. I don't think the UI should freeze though, unless there is something peculiar about that with linux.

I'll check the playback with conversion and see what kind of format it actually uses, and maybe swap it to one thats more friendly to seeking as well - or if the server-seeking overrides are actually working as they should.

mattkhan:

--- Quote from: JimH on February 21, 2023, 09:08:31 am ---Which Linux?  Which desktop?  Version of MC?

--- End quote ---
Debian testing
KDE
Latest 30


--- Quote from: Hendrik on February 21, 2023, 09:10:40 am ---I'll check the playback with conversion and see what kind of format it actually uses, and maybe swap it to one thats more friendly to seeking as well - or if the server-seeking overrides are actually working as they should.

--- End quote ---
Thanks for checking

lepa:
Thanks Hendrik for looking into it. Also to my experience the video part has been little unstable.

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