That's probably the spirit that got VLC where it is now. Not having the time or the skill to contribute is one thing, being willing to contribute but only if there's money involved is another.
I have more productive things to do with my non-work time than spending it hacking even more. Diving headfirst into arbitrary codebases is just my day job. And really, it's not like one could make much money by maintaining a VLC port. It'd still be something they did out of love, reduction of evilness of job, or a combination of the two. ('Un'fortunately, my current job is already very non-evil.)
To VLC Team: If you're only making 10k EUR maybe you're not getting the maximum donations possible? I think your audience is big enough that there is more than 10k EUR per annum of gratitude to be harvested. (Pulled out of local donkey.)
If people would prefer to use something else than pay for VLC, then VLC is literally not worth it.
It's quite possible that's the case; I think most people on Mac would rather use Quicktime (w/ Flip4Mac [1], which is Microsoft-supported) for free than pay for VLC. But if there were a trivially easy way to pay a dollar, I think a lot of folks would. Ultimately, open source projects that aren't fun to work on will live or die by the micropayments problem.
1 or whatever; I'd never heard of Perian before this thread, and I just switched back to Linux from OS X.
"It's quite possible that's the case; I think most people on Mac would rather use Quicktime (w/ Flip4Mac [1], which is Microsoft-supported) for free than pay for VLC."
I'm probably an atypical Mac user. I sometimes use my Mac to watch movies, but generally don't care for the OSX UI and don't care if something doesn't have a true OSX feel (n fact, non-OSX may suit me better). (I have a Mini for development purposes but do most things on Kubuntu.)
I like using VLC because, aside from its feature set, I use it on Vista and Kubuntu as well and know what it can do and how to do it. (Usually; for whatever reason, the default keyboard shorts are oddly different on different platforms. I don't think it's because of collisions with preexisting shortcuts, and I usually just reassign them to suit myself.)
This thread has informed me about some other OSX options I'll try out, but so far VLC is about the most full-featured player I've seen. Couldn't live without the equalizer, gamma/brightness control, audio sync adjustment, and such.
There are other differences, too. The playlist showed up by default on the OS X version of VLC, and I haven't found a way to make that happen on the Ubuntu version. Also, the OS X version has a very nice "jump 10 seconds" feature which the Ubuntu version seems to lack entirely (or I couldn't find it). It's weird that the OS X version of VLC actually seemed to have more features and a markedly better interace than the linux version, to the point that although I used VLC almost exclusively on OS X, now that I use linux I usually use Totem.
Not sure about the playlist thing, but on linux there are keyboard shortcuts for jumps of varying lengths (some combo of left or right arrow and ctrl|alt|shift variations).
