[vlc-devel] Streaming wizard issues

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 01:12:15 +0100, Pierre Ynard <linkfanel at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> The important number of items might be confusing for the basic user who
> doesn't know anything about streaming, and has no idea what to choose
> (nor what they really want). Clearer names are better, but things like
> "UDP (legacy)" still tend to be visual clutter.

I don't disagree. But I am currently focusing on simplifying and improving
the wizard _not_ at the expense of features.

And there is the big issue. We can still improve usability quite a bit, but
we cannot simplify much more if at all without cutting down on features.

> Instead of having one list item and type of tab for each streaming
> method, we could group together protocols that listen to incoming
> connections (HTTP, MMSH, RTSP), and ones that stream to a given
> recipient (RTP, UDP).

I fail to see how that would simplify things really.

Worse, if we add support for RTP over non-UDP transports, RTP would need to
be in both categories.

>  - This allows us to make it clearer that some protocols take a local
>    address to bind to, and maybe a path, and others expect a destination
>    address (and to factorize the corresponding logic)

People not understanding what those protocols are are unlikely to
understand this distinction. In fact, I suspect many of the people who do
know the protocols would not even understand the distinction either.

>  - As Rémi mentioned on IRC, we can bring back the SAP stuff into the
>    RTP/UDP tab

>  - This makes it easy to recommend a protocol by making the default, and
>    deprecate others (UDP...) by tossing them to the bottom of a list or
>    as a secondary parameter; and that's good for users who have no idea
>    which variant to choose.

Eventually, we should drop UDP and WMSP[1] from the wizard completely in
favor of RTP and RTSP.

[1] Microsoft has deprecated it in favor of RTSP already.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont