Rahul,
if my memory is not failing, some packages appeared first in ATrpms
than if Fedora (livna/rpmfusion): xvidcap, xzgv, xv, etc. I am not discussing
if these packages are useful or not. The fedora version of xzgv was never able
to display the thumbnails correctly, for instance. Why? Because it has to be compiled with
gcc3.
But the only reason for the existence of a 3rd party repo is a multimedia package.
Almost all of them are based on ffmpeg, which is obtained from svn. Therefore,
it is very difficult to have compatible packages, since ffmpeg API changes very often.
Because of that, packages like, vlc, mplayer and xine, must get all of their dependencies from the same repo. As a matter of fact, Fedora supplies a chopped version of xine, and the other repos try to "fill the gaps". They accomplish this by creating packages, such as,
xine-lib-moles, xine-lib-extras-nonfree, xine-lib-extras-freeworld, etc.
In xine particular case, it is much easier to compile it as a whole, than wasting hours
trying to see what is missing. Again, I understand the license issue, but it would be much more
appropriate if Fedora did not supply it at all (I think a gstreamer solution only would be preferable).
But this is my opinion only.
Returning to the sound problem, the snapshots come from here:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/
As you can see, there is also an alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot. The stable snapshot
have already been committed to the kernel tree. As a consequence, it should not bring
any headache. I am running it on several computers that stay on 24/7. Of course,
they work for my codecs (basically, snd-hda-intel/sigmatel), wich are the ones I can test.