[Android] I wanted to contribute to vlc android!

[juliank at i2pmail.org]

Hi Abhinav,

Good on you. Great to see another person jump into the world of free-license and open-source development!

I regret to inform that you are the third person in as many months who have tried to join the team using the mailing list, including myself. Noone follows it, sadly. Since the start of June I tried posting several bugs (below) but none were received. You'd do better to contact them directly. Geoffrey Métais 'geoffrey (dot) metais "is at" gmail.com', Jean-Baptiste Kempf 'jb "is at" videolan.org', or Hugo Beauzée-Luyssen 'hugo "is at" beauzee.fr'.

On 20 Aug I sent this to Geoffrey and Hugo, unfortunately they insisted that I move to the Google-guarded-Gitlab page.

This is what I sent and none of the below points have been added as bugs yet, AFAIK.

Hi Geoffrey and Hugo,

You might remember that you helped me a couple months ago when I had trouble contacting the team. Thanks for that. Unfortunately I've not had luck with the mailing list. Over the past two months I posted several things to the mailing list to no avail. I emailed jb about this. He admitted that "mailing lists are dead" and his response to my feedback, bugs and improvement proposals was incomplete so I'm emailing you both, given that you were both helpful in the past.

1. In VLC, can I give +1 for Replay Gain, there is a feature request in the Gitlab about this. If a computer cannot adjust the volume based on a user's directive (metadata/tag in the file) it is failing as an automation tool. Having to run to ones device every time tracks play is problematic. I had a lot to share on this topic and you can see it in the mailing list.

2. In m3u playlists filenames with square brackets '[]' and sharps '#' are **silently** dropped from the playlist (please note that I say 'silently'. Jean quickly said this is normal to reject non-url characters but then why are spaces allowed? He has not answered. Also '[]' characters do appear to function in URLs. I propose that if the path is a local filepath (ie. not '[a-z]+://') then I believe that we should accept '#' characters or produce an error notification). More on this in the mailing list.

3. There is no scrollbar in the playlists (or history-lists) when a user jumps to the playing track in the playlist.

4. Scrolling through long playlists with 1000+ tracks should take 3 seconds max, when a user performs a fast flicking swipe. More in the mailing list.

5. I'm also making myself available for design work. Email me the brief and I'll do it in a collaborative way (I personally find the status bar icons too busy, the cone and the play icon is not a great solution). Yes I do design work professionally.

If you want me to have access to the git repo then maybe one of you can sign me up and send me the password and hopefully I'll be able to sign in without Google and can change the password and we can proceed. I only ask this because I cannot signup without running proprietary Google scripts, and that goes against my (free-software) principles.

If you need any extra clarification please look back over my entries to the mailing list over the past two months or so. More detail can be provided if needed.

I hope the team appreciates the effort I've gone to in my attempts to report improvement proposals and bugs, and they are reported to the team in the preferred medium (eg. the gitlab).

Thanks and bye for now,

J

As I said the response I got was not encouraging sadly. Developing VLC is therefore not as "free" as I thought it might be. Have you heard of QuodLibet? I'd like to talk to them about Android development, but I'm too busy on other projects.

If you are happy to use VLC's Google-guarded-Gitlab and choose to develop VLC, please tell me and I'll send you the above bug reports and improvement proposals in full so you can post them up on my behalf without needing to look back through the mailing list records.

Thanks and good luck, Abhinav! The project's on your webpage look helpful! Stay safe and well and I look forward to talking with you more soon.

J