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It seems like I got carried away with the length of my previous post. So for popular annoyance, I'll split it up into more bite-sized chunks, as there's a (sort-of) broken link in it and I'll have to make it turn up in everyone's aggregator again anyway. Perhaps I should go to one topic per post slowly. Having only a short paragraph for a topic seems to be a waste of people's attention, though.
Feedster: I believe the results Feedster gives for a default 'by Relevance' search on iTunes 4 aren't satisfactory. I thought I could use it to keep an overview of the zillions of of posts on the topic, lazy web style. By the way, the "Next" link at the bottom of the search results page takes me back to the start page, probably still a consequence of Scott being too smart. [Comments are still with the original post.]
Shift: Elsewhere in the exciting world of computer played media, there is MPlayer which is currently my favourite for playback of media. While it can still use some work in the multi-monitor department, it's good at playback, even subtitles worked smoothly for me and it played about anything I bothered to throw at it. Even the interface is quite simple. Just one thing I found disturbing: There's a 'Statistics' menu item that displays a window with numbers on the current playback, such as the number of dropped frames, a few zeroes and the 'Sync Shift', giving you how far the sound track is off the images you see. WTF? It knows the sound is off, why doesn't it just adjust it accordingly? On the positive side, there's no lever to adjust how far off you want your sound – after all it's all about choice – as there probably is in the Linux version for real men. And there's only one blatantly obvious typo in the German translation as well.
Versiontracker has annoyed me for quite a while now. Basically since they stopped you from being able to download stuff straight from their front page, the site became a complete nuisance. And now it's become even worse, with a new, even more broken, layout, longer waits etc. And I'm not the only one thinking of it this way.
It's a tricky thing of course. Looking at our referrer logs, Versiontracker is a major contributor to our software's fame, so we don't pull it despite disliking the site.