With the overall design I was trying to maintain the Sun Valley (Windows 11) design, and given the new Media Player for Windows 11 which is supposed to come out soon, looked good enough, I mostly went with its design/layout - with some tweaks of course. That is the reason there are miniature icons on some of the 'tabs/cards' The idea behind this concept of VLC Media Player was that it could/would be a 'universal' media player, meaning, you could sign in to your accounts throughout multiple platforms (Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Deezer, Shazam, Netflix, YouTube/Google etc.) and stream them using one player (for those who know - sort of like GOG Galaxy but for music & video). When quality actually matters, obviously I use something that's MadVR-compatible (I use MPC-HC or MPC-BE), but I don't want to watch the screen flash and wait for the GPU to switch the refresh rate (and possibly color space) to watch a 15-second video I downloaded from soemone's shitpost, so, for me, VLC4 is basically exactly what I wanted from it.

Further, it seems to start up more quickly (low-confidence on my appraisal of this), which is also ideal for my use-case.

The ugly UI has always annoyed me-I use VLC primarily as a quick / dirty viewer for media files when quality isn't important, because it supports a wide range of formats and doesn't mode-switch (and, in its portable format, I've used it on work-computers where the permissions are locked down).

Also, the version I downloaded offered a fair amount of UI customization options, though not sure if it would allow you to emulate the layout of the prior version you had in mind (I did notice that the legacy presets are no longer available I downloaded the LLVM-compiled version in case that is useful). >was not the case that you did not like nothing, and you did not like the button-placement

Vlc media player 64 bit for windows 10