My unpleasant interactions with Yoga around Voracious

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The background is that I had started working on Voracious on and off in 2016. In early August 2018, I decided to develop it further. I mentioned this to CalculusAce and Vladz0r, and Vladz0r basically said "oh wow, Yoga is working on something super similar, you should talk to him".

So I reached out to Yoga (my first time talking to him), and it went like this:

I was excited to discuss features and implementation with someone working on a similar project. He said he had been working on his player for 3 days, and that it was halfway done. He was cagey about details, and said "When i release it you can look at the code and see how I did it", which I felt was weird because mine was already open source, out in the open, I just wanted to have a mutually beneficial sharing of ideas!

Several weeks later I had gotten Voracious to a good place, and I checked in with Yoga and see if his player was out. I was curious to compared what we built. We had this exchange:

Once again, at this point he had not released anything, and Voracious was released, free, open source. So when he says stuff like "are you going to steal every feature I release on my player?" it is extra baffling. Also his insistence that I need not build mine (which I already built) because his will do everything I want and be released very soon, was not borne out, as it sounds like he is just releasing a player now, two years later.

After this, I had an awkward video chat with Yoga and Matt, where Yoga was apologetic but asked me to do him the favor of keeping Voracious a secret, so that he could first release his player and charge people for it for a few months. I was disappointed that Matt supported Yoga in asking for this, but it was definitely driven by Yoga. I politely told them no. By this point I was honestly feeling "fuck this Yoga guy", but even in principle, why would I withhold a free product from potential users so that he can make some money?

Anyways, I don't know the details of the MIA situation but my experience with Yoga makes me distrust his account and intentions.

Your repo history shows you clearly worked on it far more after you realized I was working on something similar. I am done with drama now though and you might be happy to know I am fully on board the open source train right along with you.

I will also just say that even then with YogaPlayer the intent was to release it for free and for it to be open-source eventually anyways. The few months where it would have been used to build up a Patreon for me would have been negligible in comparison to having it publicly released for free forever in the long-run.

Good stuff. But honestly, the idea of using a standalone player to make Anki cards sounds a bit silly to me. You guys should focus on writing mpv add-ons instead. I realize that the technology wasn't there in 2018 but in a few months from now apparently mpv is going to receive a new scripting interface that should allow writing add-ons like https://github.com/pigoz/lat.

Good stuff. But honestly, the idea of using a standalone player to make Anki cards sounds a bit silly to me. You guys should focus on writing mpv add-ons instead. I realize that the technology wasn't there in 2018 but in a few months from now apparently mpv is going to receive a new scripting interface that should allow writing add-ons like https://github.com/pigoz/lat.

Agreed as mpv already has a really good support for lots of video, audio and subtitle formats among other things. It's even possible to use mpv as a core in a custom player and there's already lots of examples of that. It's also crossplatfom. Quoting mpv.io:

mpv has an OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D11 based video output that is capable of many features loved by videophiles, such as video scaling with popular high quality algorithms, color management, frame timing, interpolation, HDR, and more.

Powerful scripting capabilities can make the player do almost anything. There is a large selection of user scripts on the wiki.

A straightforward C API was designed from the ground up to make mpv usable as a library and facilitate easy integration into other applications.

Me personally, I'm pretty strict about the picture quality, which is why I don't really use anything else outside of mpv and MPC-HC with custom codecs to get the best quality and other features such as remote controlling.

I am also interested into looking at working on something like that in the future so maybe we could cooperate, however I would first have to check with my supporters and see where that would fit in on the priority list.

Meh those conversations were quite distasteful.

Good stuff. But honestly, the idea of using a standalone player to make Anki cards sounds a bit silly to me. You guys should focus on writing mpv add-ons instead. I realize that the technology wasn't there in 2018 but in a few months from now apparently mpv is going to receive a new scripting interface that should allow writing add-ons like https://github.com/pigoz/lat.

Doing mpv addons isn't that great. You are forced to write Lua or a Javascript (that runs in a very limited VM). Before lat I did another similar project (also started in early august 2018, lol) that transpiled TypeScript to JavaScript but it was a pain to develop features on it, and hated touching that code.

@rentatsumoto This is, of course, a question of choice. Someone doesn't care about imaginary technological limitations or the guts of program. That's why Voracious is suitable for 95% of people who learn languages, because they don't need anything but a working tool. As for addons for mpv, like your mpvacious or the above mentioned lat, they have one big problem.

The problem is that they are absolutely not user friendly. They are complicated to install, to set up, to write an issue you must have a Github account, you have to be able to use keybinds, you have to do some routine things: copy, paste, search words manually. Personally I am in favor of full automation of processes. From installation to results.

Of course, Voracious is not ideal because of the choice of frameworks. Overloaded with a variety of things, Electron app makes a person download as much as 80-120 megabytes for things that could be arranged in a regular player (mpv for example). This is also an extra program, which serves only one purpose. After all, hardly any of you have 10 text editors or five browsers at once.

But, no matter what, we have all the tools. Voracious, mpvacious, lat, it's a pity that the world will not see Yoga Player. I think that if @LucasMIA had a better attitude towards free software, he would achieve his goals much faster with the help of users. Oh, that poor world ruled by money...