THE DJ  Please realize that 1.0rc4 was a preview release, and that the 64bit version was even more of a preview and won't be an official release. It is a work in progress towards Snow Leopard and the first experimental 64bit version of VLC that VideoLAN has made available.  
(Version 1.0rc4)

THE DJ  0.9.9a is coming soon to fix that.  
(Version 0.9.9)

THE DJ  Just so everyone knows:

Building VLC for PPC is REALLY hard, when no developer uses PPC anymore. So every time around releasedate we find that something broke (usually ffmpeg), and we need to spend time fixing it (often this delays the ppc version, this time even more than before).

VLC has many mac developer veterans, but almost no ACTIVE mac developers (significantly holding back VLC Mac development, and usually keeping us in the "we need to keep it running"-mode, instead of the "let's improve it"-mode)

We discovered we forgot to update ffmpeg for the intel version in 0.9.9, so we are preparing an 0.9.9a release, which should have the RV30/40 support (intel AND ppc) like announced for 0.9.9 and a PPC version should be ready as well.

The amount of mess ups we have made with the Mac build on the 0.9.* versions with simply making a working and up-to-date binary should show you the need for fresh Mac OS X blood in the VLC media player team.

But rest assured, the PPC build is coming. For 1.0.0, however we are dropping support for anything older than Leopard. (sorry folks can't help it, we need llvm for some threading and locking features we use in the VLC core and 10.5 is the lowest platform that has this, and even then we need to switch to llvm-gcc). PPC support is still uncertain, it depends on wether we can get a working build with 10.5 llvm-gcc on powerpc. It looks like it might be possible, but it's proving to be a huge challenge. We haven't given up on that though.  
(Version 0.9.9)

THE DJ  The screenshot creator tips his hat to those fellow Ellen Feiss-fans. :D  
(Version 0.8.5)

THE DJ  no, normal up,down,left,right is used for dvd,vcd and OSD menu navigation.   
(Version 0.8.5)

THE DJ  Did you try resetting the preferences ? There is a handy script on the .dmg that deletes all VLC caches and preferences.  
(Version 0.8.5)

THE DJ  Everyone is welcome to assist in the translation.

http://developers.videolan.org/i18n/vlc.html  
(Version 0.8.4a)

THE DJ  You shouldn't play from shared sources. VLC is quite lousy at that, because the shared resource will not respond fast enough to VLCs requests. VLC does almost 0 buffering. it was designed as a LAN raw streaming client originally and then you don't need it, nor want it.

same for frame by frame playback. At the base level, VLC doesn't know what frames are. It only knows timecodes at which data should be presented. Data can contain multiple frames or be partial frames.

Pausing, seeking all of that occurs at that time/data level, not on a frame level. It is very suited for streaming not so much for playback, but it is deep within our core and migrating to support both will still take more then a year at least.

We know about all these issues you report, however we cannot and won't fix them at this time.

VLC basically still is an MPEG2 streaming system, and just because we have become so popular at being a player, doesn't mean we will drop those roots. It's the only thing in the world that deals so well with MPEG2 streaming, and the settopbox producers who built upon VLC would hate to see such functionality disappear, as would we the VLC developers.

Good luck with Xine or MPlayer is my advise.  
(Version 0.8.4a)

THE DJ  There is always someone who doesn't like it. We cannot please everyone.  
(Version 0.8.4a)

THE DJ  We mostly write the program, we don't reverse engineer codecs. You should contact the ffmpeg team, which does most of the reverse engineering work when it comes to codecs.  
(Version 0.8.4a)

THE DJ  BTW. if you set "Use SPDIF if available" in the Preferences->Audio section, then you don't even need to select it in the menu every time.

If you have your Datasource set to SPDIF, the stereo sound will also automatically go there, even if you have "Encoded output" selected in VLC.  
(Version 0.8.4a)

THE DJ  Yup, the biggest feature of this 0.8.4a release for Mac OS X users is the SPDIF support for the PowerMac G5.  
(Version 0.8.4a)

DJ  And you will reverse engineer this codec?

Respectfully shut up if you don't know what you are talking about please.

Reverse engineering this closed source proprietary MS codec will take years normally. Hopefully the codec will become an industry HD-DVD standard soon, so then at least some people can look at the specification of this document, which will hopefully speed up that process greatly. Untill then please take your complaints to Microsoft.  
(Version 0.8.0)

DJ  Please notice that this is a test build that is supposed to be for experienced VLC users and VLC testers. It still has many major bugs and is absolutely not advised to be used in any form beyond bughunting.

If you have comments please use VLC's http://forum.videolan.org/ to report any issues (of which there are many, about 18 problems have already been solved today).

I have asked that this version gets pulled from VersionTracker

DJ

A VLC developer  
(Version 0.8.0-test 2)

DJ  You try watching a DVD in such a interface. It sucks. That's why Apple DVD player doesn't do that either.  
(Version 0.8.0-test 2)

DERK-JAN HARTMAN  If the pitch is incorrect, then that means the video file is not 100% correct. VLC is very depandent on the timing information in the file. Most players ignore this, but it is key to VLC's streaming capabilities. Unfortunetly the fact that many players ignore this information results in there being many files that are incorrectly encoded.  
(Version 0.7.1a)