GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 795261
Make gst-play seeking behavior symmetric
Last modified: 2018-04-24 00:45:50 UTC
Hi, I catch myself using gst-play-1.0 maybe more than I should and I find the asymmetry between forward and reverse seeking a little weird. I guess it is this way to allow/demonstrate different seeking steps, but I think the current behavior can be improved by using left/right for fine-grained seeking and PgUp/PgDown for coarse-grained seeking. A patch which proposes this change is on its way. Ciao, Antonio
Created attachment 370934 [details] [review] tools: play: make seeking behavior symmetrical gst-play-1.0 uses different granularities when seeking forwards and backwards with the right and left arrows or with the mouse wheel, this asymmetric behavior can be surprising to users. Make the seeking behavior with the arrows keys symmetric and introduce new keybindings (PgUp and PgDown) for the more coarse-grained seeking. This way it is still possible to seek with different steps but in a less surprising way. The mouse wheel is now bound to the fine-grained seeking. In the keyboard controls legend the Unicode characters for "page up" and "page down" are used: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/21de/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/21df/index.htm
The reason it is like that is because typically when you want to find a spot you do RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT until you overshoot and then the LEFT LEFT in smaller jumps makes it more convenient. GNOME Movie Player (Totem) does the same I think.
Ah, I didn't know asymmetric seeking was a thing. I verified that totem does it indeed, and it looks like https://crates.io/crates/glide too opted for this strategy. I have to check what VLC and my TV set do. I come from mplayer and ffplay and both use symmetric seeking and use different sets of keys for different granularities: Left/Right and PgUp/PgDown. I find this a lot more logical, also considering that there are keys available to support different seeking steps in a symmetric way. Anyways you know what my preference is, I guess it's up to you to apply or discard the patches as both strategy can make sense. If I was to push for an argument I'd say that gst-play-1.0 is more in the league of mplayer and ffplay, so maybe the more technical target users may expect/prefer the symmetric behavior. Thanks, Antonio
FWIW both VLC and my LG TV seek with the same step when going forward and backward. Ciao, Antonio
Right. I don't think there's really a right or wrong here, and TVs work differently anyway since in most cases you just use the FF/FR buttons to go back/forward faster/slower, no? I like the current behaviour and I think I'd like to keep it this way for now, but I wouldn't object to someone adding additional keybindings or mouse wheel bindings for evenly-spaced steps.
On the TV I use the Left and Right arrows on the navigation pad to seek, but that's because I am a computer person, I guess. As I said, I am not going to insist. :) Thanks, Antonio
So do you want to provide a patch for additional key/wheel bindings that implements symmetric seek behaviour or will you just keep the patch you have local for now?
We might add PgUp/PgDown for symmetric seeking with one step and change only the current behavior of the mouse wheel to use the symmetric seeking but with a different step than PgUp/PgDown, but then we will have two different behaviors between Left/Right and PgUp/PgDown/Mousewheel, which can be even more confusing to new users... now the asymmetry would also be between the behaviors themselves :) So I guess I'll just try to adjust to the current behavior (inconvenient for me but at least consistent), and drop my patch completely. Keeping it local is not an option. Ciao, Antonio
Feel free to reopen if you come up with an idea.