Another day, another less than optimal OSS problem

Well, today I have yet another problem in Linux, it's a problem that has happened, more or less, since I've been using Linux. Video Players.

Generally, I believe OSS has the strict advantage here when it comes to video players. We have so much technology behind our backends; they play about anything you throw at them, they consume so little memory, and they run on vintage hardware. Where's the problem? The GUI.

gmplayer - This one sucks less in the whole category, which really is a farce, because you would look at the preferences option and run to the toilet. The skins, which in general I deeply hate, actually improve it. I can make it seem to be livable in this case. The main problem I've found with it is it breaks with Pulseaudio, or Pulseaudio/ALSA plugin, unless I've compiled in support with mplayer, with an out of source patch. Even mplayer works, just not gmplayer. Also, probably the most hacky feeling out of the bunch.

xine. Xine-libs are wonderful, and they'll help fuel some of the great things that are supposed to be happening in KDE4, but xine-ui is horrible, not only that but it is documented to be broken beyond repair.

Smplayer. Obviously this developer never needed to compile it, because I never got past that with some error. Not to mention it has a custom make system that sucks horribly.

Kaffeine - Oh the suckage that is kaffine. Horrible UI, general instability. I have a hard time believing that it's an semi-official KDE project.

VLC - Compiled the latest stable, a snapshot, then I even tried the trunk. None worked for me. At all.

totem - Depending on Gnome is definitely a strike against it, but then I tried it and it _seemed_ not to suck. Then it hung on a video.

It's really horrible to say, but all of this has made me pine for the days of running Window Media Player (with Windows 98/2000).

In some of the above examples, granted, that it may not strictly be the UI's fault, or more correctly the UI may not be the cause, but the UI should definitely not lock up or crash, no matter what happens in the backend. Some of it maybe even a distribution problem, granted that Gentoo has it's warts, but I've seen some of the frontends in other distributions and they fare no better there.