6 ms·

VideoLAN launches new website

69 points by ashraful 16y ago

matthew-wegner 16y ago
The line spacing makes things quite hard to read. What's going on here? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.48%20AM.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-... And on other pages columns are quite constrained, which makes for ridiculous word spacing with justification: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.28%20AM.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-...
- jbk 16y ago
  Totally agree. Any idea so we can improve it?
  - lancer383 16y ago
    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.
    - jbk 16y ago
      http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Websites&path=%2Fwww.videolan.org%2Fstyle%2Fstyle.css.in http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Web...
  - makeramen 16y ago
    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.
    - jbk 16y ago
      Done.
      - makeramen 16y ago
        it also looks like you're line breaking after every sentence... I would make it either one big paragraph, bullet points, or put in real paragraph breaks if they are meant to be separate paragraphs.
jhonnycano 16y ago
Cool, I Like it !
tagfolder 16y ago
Looks nice, I hope they will also improve design of vlc player soon. :)
- jbk 16y ago
  I am working on that, but it is quite hard... If you have any insightful ideas, ("it isn't pretty" isn't one), please mail me...
Entlin 16y ago
Too many traffic cones.
- shawnlower 16y ago
  10 years, and I still don't know what the deal is with the fscking cones...
  - sp332 16y ago
    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.
beoba 16y ago
The huge "MADE BY X" in the header is a bit overkill
jedsmith 16y ago
That's a very bold place to put "Made by Argon", especially at that size. Is the Web site about who made it or is that auxiliary information? If the latter, that's the wrong spot for that graphic, and I wouldn't have let them get away with it. Even if they were doing it for free. There's a pretty well-defined footer where that belongs. Edit: Ouch. Compare: > http://www.videolan.org/ http://www.videolan.org/ > http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ That is confusing. Try going back and forth a few times. The text growing legs in the logo and walking a few pixels is rough, especially since it's in the exact same spot and completely obvious when you click. There's some consistency issues that can use improvement. They're clearly still tweaking it, too - I refreshed and the footer completely lost its centering.
- shadowflit 16y ago
  While I don't disagree, I had to reopen the link to figure out what you were talking about. The even bigger banner and traffic cone logo drew my attention away from the top of the page such that I never noticed the self-promotion up there. Of course if I actually tried to navigate on the site, it would be a different story, I'm sure.
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  at least it doesn't have a different background color, so it fades into the background a little bit.
- makeramen 16y ago
  I wonder if it may have been promotional work done by the designer for cheap, in exchange for that giant front page advertisement.
  - jbk 16y ago
    Yes.
- jbk 16y ago
  Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal... And this is temporary... About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what? Small steps for iterations... Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...
meemo 16y ago
The "made by" tag looks unprofessional. As if the website designer is as important as his customer.
- jbk 16y ago
  Great. We are not professional.
albertzeyer 16y ago
A bit OT: VLC, while it often just works, is one of the slowest players I know. I often have a lot of jittering, esp. when doing some CPU/IO intensive work in the background but also without. Sometimes when I play from a Samba share, it may also because of slow connection, whereby the connection should be fast enough to play it in real-time without a problem. I already played a lot around with settings like skipping frames, cache size, etc. but I never really got it removed completely. And the UI, esp. controls like play/pause, also feel a bit laggy. E.g., when I hit pause, it still plays for about half a second. MPlayer is among the fastest players I know. One good sign of that is that I can normally play Xvid/H264 videos with it on my 350MHz PII with an onboard graphics card (Riva128) in Xorg without any problem. And on my normal PC, it never has any performance problems, no matter what I do in the background. And it also responds really fast. When I hit pause, it instantly pauses. Only problem with MPlayer: It often does not integrate that well, at least on MacOSX (maybe most of this is Mac related). And there are no real official binaries and the ones which exists are outdated. Also, all of the available GUIs often have further problems and make the performance a lot worse (which I don't really understand). Anyway, why I am writing this: Often enough, I have thought about that the VLC GUI and OS integration (also including automatic updates, etc.), with MPlayer as the engine, would be the best thing.
- coffeedrinker 16y ago
  Likely a Mac related problem. I have no trouble with VLC on my Windows machine nor on my work iMac. However, the home iMac has issues. In my administrator account on the machine the video is fine, but in my wife's non-privileged account the video can stutter. And all video stutters--flash, VLC, QuickTime. And it comes and goes with various OS updates. I've never been able to find the root cause.
  - albertzeyer 16y ago
    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.
runningdogx 16y ago
They're finally displaying the version number on the download button! That was my main gripe with the old site.
- jbk 16y ago
  Well, the old site was confusing in many aspects. The documentation and support was impossible to find and it was almost impossible to maintain... Of course, this is a first step and we need to improve; but we are C/C++ developers on our free time, not web developers...
endergen 16y ago
Does anyone know if they are going to put more effort into their VLC browser plugin? I tried it a few months ago and it only work semi decently in Chrome on Windows. For Mac it was totally broken.
- jbk 16y ago
  Well, we thought <video> was going to work a bit more, so we didn't work on the plugins at all... But seeing the current mess, maybe we should :D

69 points by ashraful 16y ago

The line spacing makes things quite hard to read. What's going on here? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.48%20AM.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-... And on other pages columns are quite constrained, which makes for ridiculous word spacing with justification: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.28%20AM.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-...

jbk 16y ago
Totally agree. Any idea so we can improve it?
- lancer383 16y ago
  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.
  - jbk 16y ago
    http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Websites&path=%2Fwww.videolan.org%2Fstyle%2Fstyle.css.in http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Web...
- makeramen 16y ago
  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.
  - jbk 16y ago
    Done.
    - makeramen 16y ago
      it also looks like you're line breaking after every sentence... I would make it either one big paragraph, bullet points, or put in real paragraph breaks if they are meant to be separate paragraphs.

jhonnycano 16y ago

Cool, I Like it !

tagfolder 16y ago

Looks nice, I hope they will also improve design of vlc player soon. :)

jbk 16y ago
I am working on that, but it is quite hard... If you have any insightful ideas, ("it isn't pretty" isn't one), please mail me...

Entlin 16y ago

Too many traffic cones.

shawnlower 16y ago
10 years, and I still don't know what the deal is with the fscking cones...
- sp332 16y ago
  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.

beoba 16y ago

The huge "MADE BY X" in the header is a bit overkill

jedsmith 16y ago

That's a very bold place to put "Made by Argon", especially at that size. Is the Web site about who made it or is that auxiliary information? If the latter, that's the wrong spot for that graphic, and I wouldn't have let them get away with it. Even if they were doing it for free. There's a pretty well-defined footer where that belongs. Edit: Ouch. Compare: > http://www.videolan.org/ http://www.videolan.org/ > http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ That is confusing. Try going back and forth a few times. The text growing legs in the logo and walking a few pixels is rough, especially since it's in the exact same spot and completely obvious when you click. There's some consistency issues that can use improvement. They're clearly still tweaking it, too - I refreshed and the footer completely lost its centering.

shadowflit 16y ago
While I don't disagree, I had to reopen the link to figure out what you were talking about. The even bigger banner and traffic cone logo drew my attention away from the top of the page such that I never noticed the self-promotion up there. Of course if I actually tried to navigate on the site, it would be a different story, I'm sure.
bryanlarsen 16y ago
at least it doesn't have a different background color, so it fades into the background a little bit.
makeramen 16y ago
I wonder if it may have been promotional work done by the designer for cheap, in exchange for that giant front page advertisement.
- jbk 16y ago
  Yes.
jbk 16y ago
Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal... And this is temporary... About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what? Small steps for iterations... Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...

meemo 16y ago

The "made by" tag looks unprofessional. As if the website designer is as important as his customer.

jbk 16y ago
Great. We are not professional.

albertzeyer 16y ago

A bit OT: VLC, while it often just works, is one of the slowest players I know. I often have a lot of jittering, esp. when doing some CPU/IO intensive work in the background but also without. Sometimes when I play from a Samba share, it may also because of slow connection, whereby the connection should be fast enough to play it in real-time without a problem. I already played a lot around with settings like skipping frames, cache size, etc. but I never really got it removed completely. And the UI, esp. controls like play/pause, also feel a bit laggy. E.g., when I hit pause, it still plays for about half a second. MPlayer is among the fastest players I know. One good sign of that is that I can normally play Xvid/H264 videos with it on my 350MHz PII with an onboard graphics card (Riva128) in Xorg without any problem. And on my normal PC, it never has any performance problems, no matter what I do in the background. And it also responds really fast. When I hit pause, it instantly pauses. Only problem with MPlayer: It often does not integrate that well, at least on MacOSX (maybe most of this is Mac related). And there are no real official binaries and the ones which exists are outdated. Also, all of the available GUIs often have further problems and make the performance a lot worse (which I don't really understand). Anyway, why I am writing this: Often enough, I have thought about that the VLC GUI and OS integration (also including automatic updates, etc.), with MPlayer as the engine, would be the best thing.

coffeedrinker 16y ago
Likely a Mac related problem. I have no trouble with VLC on my Windows machine nor on my work iMac. However, the home iMac has issues. In my administrator account on the machine the video is fine, but in my wife's non-privileged account the video can stutter. And all video stutters--flash, VLC, QuickTime. And it comes and goes with various OS updates. I've never been able to find the root cause.
- albertzeyer 16y ago
  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.

runningdogx 16y ago

They're finally displaying the version number on the download button! That was my main gripe with the old site.

jbk 16y ago
Well, the old site was confusing in many aspects. The documentation and support was impossible to find and it was almost impossible to maintain... Of course, this is a first step and we need to improve; but we are C/C++ developers on our free time, not web developers...

endergen 16y ago

Does anyone know if they are going to put more effort into their VLC browser plugin? I tried it a few months ago and it only work semi decently in Chrome on Windows. For Mac it was totally broken.

jbk 16y ago
Well, we thought <video> was going to work a bit more, so we didn't work on the plugins at all... But seeing the current mess, maybe we should :D