Documentation and support
How much help you can get online for each player?
User guides, manuals, articles, FAQs and wiki pages make a huge a difference. You may want to learn more about a player that you’ve been using for some time, or you just learn how to use a particular feature. Regardless, documentation is a useful tool to solve problems and highlight important features of a player.
Bomi has an attractive website with the support section, but it’s quite small and only has brief instructions on things such as how to make debug logs or feature requests and email them to project maintainers. We assume that as as Bomi is a young project, the situation will improve in future.
VLC, as an established player, boasts the best documentation, including detailed user guides for different platforms, active forums ( https://forum.videolan.org) and lots of third-party materials (such as the famous Arch Wiki) with extra tips, tricks and tweaks. VLC’s documentation has been translated into many languages and is available not only in HTML, but also in the PDF format.
SMPlayer tries to provide good support and offers forums, FAQs, a public bug tracker and feature request page. The main website is also very user-friendly and enables newcomers to quickly learn what’s special about SMPlayer and what distinctive features it has. The Help section is also populated with useful links to a user guide, FAQs and even command line options – overall, a very decent package.
QMplay2 is a great player, but it has a handful of places where you can learn more about it other than via the Readme at https://github.com/ zaps166/QMPlay2. Currently the lack of documentation is a real obstacle that prevents QMPlay2 from becoming a popular player.
Interestingly, Romp used to have a very strong level of support, and even though development has stalled right now the existing materials are still available and relevant. The developers have created a good wiki with a useful first-steps guide and even a promo video on Youtube ( http://bit. ly/1LpStSz). Of course, this is still not enough to beat the wealth of VLC documentation, but shows a good example of how a fork of a video player can be promoted and supported.