VideoLAN launches new website

Yes.

Before I began my response to you I scrolled through your responses in this thread. I remember your responses regarding VideoLAN's successes against Applidium, too, so that weighs in to what I'm about to write.

> Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal...

I'm not sure if you intentionally overlook things that the comments you reply to clearly say (you did this in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082505 too), but I acknowledged that the designer might have been doing pro-bono work for you and I still consider the self-promotion inappropriate. The promotion there gives the designer equal footing with the very message of the site itself, which isn't how a Web site works.

The best analogy I can draw here is a production company spokesman standing in the corner of a TV drama, waving and holding a sign that says "we produced this!" for the entire length of the show. Credits in television are reserved for the end, because such a thing as I describe would dilute the message. Your Web site is your public face and your message, and the upper-right side is very prime real estate. The placement, honestly, could be perceived as a sell-out.

I am perfectly aware that pro-bono work or discounted work is traditional for a Web development shop to build a portfolio. I didn't kid myself that the VideoLAN project paid full-price for a site such as the one you have (which looks great, by the way). Even with that in mind, the promotion you are giving your designers, while your prerogative, was very quickly perceived by me and other developers in this thread as being inappropriate. I wouldn't consider the placement and size of their promotion to be "normal" at all.

That defacement of your message is something that I would never do as a designer, myself.

> And this is temporary...

What is? The entire site, or the promotion?

> About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what?

You're right, so what? I didn't draw a conclusion based on the tweaking, I simply expressed some criticism. You'll notice I didn't write "they're still tweaking, man, their site sucks".

Feedback is feedback, and jumping on the defensive when it's offered is suspicious. I went to great lengths not to offer destructive criticism. I expressed great surprise ("ouch!") at the lack of consistency between something as elementary as your logo -- look at the type alignment between / and /vlc/ on your logo. That's a big deal, and I'm surprised it slipped. That's the identity of your brand right there, and I was really surprised that one made it through, that's all.

I was also expressing surprise that the tweaking was being done in production. That is traditionally considered a bad thing, and it makes you look sloppy.

> Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...

With respect, that is absolutely the wrong attitude.

Your Web site is your brochure. It is the first thing people see when they want to know what VLC or the VideoLAN project is. That is your brand. It is your initial impression with anybody who has never heard of you.

I don't care if you consider yourself a professional or not. Everything about VideoLAN, from start to finish, should be treated with extensive polish. You should have a lot of pride in what you do, not excuses ("we are not professional" -- something I am flabbergasted to hear a chairman of a project say).

What I also experienced under Linux: It eats more power. When playing videos just on battery on my notebook, I could play much longer with mplayer and the CPU cooler stayed very slow/silent. This difference was very notable on my PowerPC notebook but also later on x86 notebooks.

But I never tried it on Windows.

Yes, that is what I also experienced with the GUI.

Try to run the MPlayer binary itself. In MPlayer OSX Extended, you can find it here:

  /Applications/MPlayer OSX Extended.app/Contents/Resources/Binaries/mpextended.mpBinaries/Contents/mpextended.mpBinaries/Contents/MacOS/mplayer

Just give it any video as parameter.

And I really wonder why the difference is so immense. Maybe the MPlayer OSX Extended GUI totally sucks. But all the other GUIs I have tried seem also to suck performance-wise or with other problems.

The cone was a placeholder/warning for early builds. By the time it got stable, everyone recognized the cone = VLC and they decided not to change it.

To be honest, a lot of the front-end issues are going to be tough to fix for a number of reasons. There are 50+ instances of inline CSS styling on just the home page, and the CSS is minified so it's hard to pass on changes that can be made in Firebug.

As well, much of the copy on the page is using line breaks rather than new paragraphs, which is why you see funny spacing like in these examples.

While I do think the bulk of the design is quite nice, the HTML/CSS end of it could use some refactoring.

First thing to do is to get rid of the justified text. Stick with ragged-right (flush left). Then you can make a better judgement of correct line spacing after the word spacing is no longer so inconsistent.