You see it as a video viewer but plenty of people use it as a general media (including music) player. If you’ve got 100 songs queued up, then keeping track of a playlist is definitely necessary.

Why does an HTML viewer need history and tabs? Aren't these features already accomplished by the xterm window the user must be invoking it from?

You're being sarcastic, but there's a grain of truth in your argument against tabs. It does feel like the kind of thing the OS should provide for any app.

On an inferior system, absolutely. On Windows, I run it either from an icon click or the Run dialog. No terminal invocation is needed.

You are right. Browsers are even worse in that respect!

I agree that it's an overrated feature, but there's plenty of use cases. Eg you want to play an evening of cool videos in a loop on a projector somewhere, your kids are allow to watch exactly two Paw Patrol episodes, etc.

Classes with 4-6 minute videos.

What about sequential playing without user interaction?

What about persistent arbitrary play ordering?

Any solution to this would just be implementing a playlist.

> What about sequential playing without user interaction?

         cvlc *

> What about persistent arbitrary play ordering?

        cvlc `ls | sort -R`

dropbox is just a remote folder which I can sync with rsync, right?

> cvlc `ls | sort -R`

Results in a same sequence once the loop completes. You should use `cvlc -Z` instead; I also happen to use `mplayer -shuffle` for this exact purpose.

> cvlc `ls | shuf`

gives you a different sequence every time

Okay, I have assumed "persistent" being a loop. The loop is being randomized but it is fixed once arguments are passed to cvlc.

why would you want to see a movie twice on the same binge?

VLC is useful as an audio player as well.

because they are watching music videos...

I use it to stream an IPTV playlist. With VLC 3 large playlist of channels would never load correctly or would take a lot of time. The recent nightlies have been much much better and content loads pretty much instantaneously.

TBH I now mostly use desktop VLC for my mp3 library. The various remote interfaces are awesome for controlling playback from a smartphone. Therefore VLC is at least to me an audio player.

Binge watching TV shows is a habit not to be overlooked.