(Do I feed him? Do I not?)
1: it fails to detect more then 1 DVD drive, I have 2, one is my regular DVD drive and the other is a DVD/DVD writer combo drive, BOTH work fine in VLC and SMPlayer on my hardware not in kaffiene.
It’s “Kaffeine”, not “kaffiene”… I don’t see any difference in the behaviour of Kaffeine in recognizing different devices. When I put a DVD into any drive, the devicemanager pops up and offers (amongst other options) to play the DVD via Kaffeine, which always works, no matter what drive is used. Now, one could complain about Kaffeine only being able to look in one device when it is already opened and the users simply chooses “Play DVD”, but this is the same behaviour as in SMPlayer, which asks the user to preset one device for DVDs.
2: there is no real way to configure the bloody thing, VLC and SMPlayer can be tweeked for the users needs, heck even Totem can be configured a little…
True, the Kaffeine-development seems to be slow, the user-interface still lacks many options one would expect from pretty much any player and in no way could it be compared to the rich interface of SMPlayer. Try configuring Xine itself.
3: Like manyQT4 apps it lacks many features of its predecessor, makes me wonder if QT4 really is “superior” if none of the QT4 ports of QT3 apps work that well.
You don’t have to wonder, Qt3 / Qt4 are pretty well documented. But you are on a totally wrong track here, as features of a player have only very little to do with the used framework. Also you should note that SMPlayer is based on Qt4 as well…
4: Buggy as hell, like the rest of KDE4
It might lack some features, but what is offered does work pretty well… I am sure I am not the only one with this impression. Since KDE4.3 Kaffeine never crashed on me or had any funny behaviour. What can I say? You are the admin of your system.
5: Its a real pain in the arse to get it working, especially with all the codecs it needs.
Oh so totally, that is at least two minutes of hard work, plus any other player will not need codecs of course… ever tried SMPlayer with the default MPlayer as provided after the initial install of a SuSE? Like playing a DVD? Or an .mpeg? Besides, as mentioned support for DVD-menus is still experimental in SMPlayer and works for me only for a few number of DVDs, while Kaffeine plays them all.
And this thread is about playing DVDs.
(Gee, I did…)
Second, arguing about the values and shortcomings of software is what windows users have to do (myself included). How can we contribute to Kaffeine (or any other application) to make it better? Either with our ideas or our code? (I’m a little light on the coding ability right now, which is why I mention ideas.)