Comparative Analysis of Usability of Media Players

Nowadays computer systems are playing a vital role in almost every aspect of human life with the help of complex and user-friendly software systems. Multimedia players are one of the application of computers system used to watch videos and listen audios. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of four media players i.e. VLC, QQ player, Windows media player class and Pot Player. We conduct a survey from exerts of different organizations on usability of media players, containing parameters i.e. learnability, efficiency, memorability, error, satisfaction. According the mention parameters we compare the given media players with each other.

Introduction

Computer and computerized devices have become an eminent element of our society. They increasingly influence many aspects of our lives; for example, the way we communicate, the way we perform our actions, and the way we interact with our environment. There are a number of quality software applications which provide many facilities and human life easy. Multimedia is one the application of software system which enables the user to play audio and video. People switched from one media player to other because there are some issues in media player or software. This paper will help the user to select an interactive media player.

VLC media player is one of the world open-source media players used by millions of users in the world. It was released 16 years ago. VLC is available on all the major operating systems such as Windows operating system and Mac OS. It is also available on Android.

Windows media player classic is an extremely light-weight, open source media player for Windows. It supports all common video and audio file formats available for playback.

QQ Player software is a free application for Windows that helps you play videos, movies and music. You can play all video and audio formats without the need for external codex packages. QQ Player helps you play videos, movies and music, snapshot video as digital images, converting video and music, play 3D movies and convert the normal 2D movies to 3D movies in one click.

Daum Pot player is a free media player that supports a variety of different video codecs and format. Pot player already includes built in codecs, eliminating the need for manual installation. It also supports Digital TV devices, Webcams, Analogs, DXVA, live broadcasts and more.

The rest of the paper is organized as follow. In section II, we summarized our literature review. Proposed methodology of our survey is explained in section III. Our results are mentioned in the section IV and section V present the conclusion and summary.

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Literature Review

Usability is an important quality attribute to be considered during software architecture design. Many usability benefits link directly to a variety of architectural tactics in addition to separation of the user interface and these benefits can be discovered early in the life cycle [1]. There are several techniques to evaluate software usability, these evaluations being quantitative and qualitative. The main way to quantitatively evaluate a software product is by using software usability metrics [2]. The success of any software or product depends on many factors and the usability is one of the most important factors. Usability is considered as the quality of software [3]. for assuring and improving quality, it is necessary to ensure quality attributes such as usability, efficiency, learnability and many more. Among of them, usability is the key quality attribute of any kind of software. With the same time, evaluation of usability is also necessary for improving the quality of the software [4]. Usability is one of the most important aspects of software quality, several methods have been developed in order to establish techniques capable of evaluating this attribute from early phases of the software development process [5].

Methodology

In this paper, we conduct our survey on usability of four media players i.e. VLC, QQ player, Windows media classic and Pot player on the basis of five parameters: learnability, efficiency, memorability, error and satisfaction.

Each media player is assigned its own matrix table. In this table rows present parameters of usability and columns represents the feedback of experts. Each column is assigned a value starting from 1-5. Media players have values near to 5 will be considered the best media player and the values near to 1 will be considered the less reliable media player. If the user is strongly satisfied means the value is five or closer to five and if the user is not satisfied means the value is one or near to one.

The media player will be considered the best if it scores 5 out of 5. Our evaluation technique is for a media player is adding up all the values of parameters and divide it by five e.g. 5+5+5+5+5/5=5 means strongly satisfied.

In this survey, experts provide scores to media players according to their experience mentioned in the example. For example, if a media player A scores 4.3 and another media player B scoring 3.9, the media player A will be said better than media player B.

Results and Discussions

After conducting our survey, we collect the scores of media player mentioned in section III. After collecting these values, we calculate the mean of these values by dividing the total score of media player by total number of users. We get the values of all the media players by using this method.

According to the opinion of our experts and our calculation. VLC media player has highest scores i.e. 3.66, Windows media classic placed second position scoring 3.44, third QQ player 3.18 and last Pot player with 3.1 scores. According to this survey VLC media player is more usable and a best solution for the users.

Conclusion

In this paper, the authors conduct a survey from the experts on the usability of four different media players i.e. VLC, QQ player, Windows media classic and Pot Player. Our survey parameters are learnability, efficiency, memorability, error and satisfaction. Our evaluation method was taking the mean of the score of each media player. After calculating the scores, we found that the VLC media player has the highest value and we proposed VLC media player as the best choice and solution the users.

References

1. B. E. J. Len Bass, 'Linking usability to software architecture patterns through general scenarios,' The Journal of Systems and Software, 2003.
2. J. P.-S. Jose Pow-Sang, 'A Systematic Mapping Review of Software Usability Metrics,' International Journal of Engineering & Technology,, 2018.
3. T. M. A. R. M. Qurat-Tul-Ain, 'Usability Practices in Software Development Life Cycle A Review,' Usability Practices in Software Development Life Cycle A Review, 2016.
4. S. I. M. Md Alamgir Kabir and Muaan Ur Rehman, 'An Analytical and Comparative Study of Software Usability Quality Factors,' IEEE , 2016.
5. J. A. P.-S. Freddy Paz, 'A Systematic Mapping Review of Usability Evaluation Methods A Systematic Mapping Review of Usability Evaluation Methods,' International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, 2016.