centralized site for FC2 multimedia?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 05:35:16PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>   so, any sites devoted to MM on FC2 that have legitimately
>> useful and tested info?
>
> The freshrpms site you mention has been very good to me.

oh, i know about freshrpms and the other RPM sites for FC2.  it's not the 
availability of RPMs that i think is the issue -- it's the apparent lack 
of a centralized site for FC2 support that can get frustrating sometimes.

first, consider www.tldp.org, the linux doc project.  reasonably well laid 
out, HOWTOs broken into convenient categories for fast searching, but some 
of the stuff there is hideously out of date, making it fairly useless for 
a lot of newer topics.  in short, the overall structure is fairly good, 
but must of the content is obsolete from the fedora perspective.

then there's a number of fedora-related sites that have sprung up, like 
fedoranews.org and fedorafaq.org.  fedoranews has lots of cool, timely 
stuff, but its organization of articles is totally chaotic and, in some 
cases, inappropriate -- some of the "fedora" articles have nothing 
whatever to do with fedora.  so the content is, with some exceptions, top 
notch, but the organization is missing entirely.

fedorafaq.org is another fedora-related site that has some good stuff. 
it's a little more organized -- has some definitely useful FAQs -- but is 
obviously not complete, being a FAQ, which is fine in that respect.
then there's fedoraforum.org, which also has good stuff, and of course the 
fedora mailing list archives, and on and on.  lots of sites and sources of 
information, all with their respective strengths and weaknesses.  and, of 
course, the RPMs themselves are at yet other sites.

it seems that what's missing is some centralized structure to all of this.
it would be handy to some kind of hierarchical umbrella over all this 
scattered information, so people don't keep asking the same question, 
like, "how can i mount my NTFS filesystem?"  the fact that questions like 
this come up *repeatedly* is pretty solid evidence that something is 
lacking.

as one thought, while many people want to start fedora-related 
information sites that are as comprehensive as possible, it might be more 
useful for some of these people to focus more narrowly.  personally, i was 
interested in a multimedia-related site for FC2, but i haven't found one.
for the most part, if you ask the question, "how do i play DVDs on FC2?",
what you typically get as an answer is "yum install xine", or something 
like that.  very terse, and nothing to help you out if something goes 
wrong.

given that most of this information is out there *somewhere*, i think it 
would be immensely useful to start an *organized* set of links to URLs 
which explain this stuff, broken into categories like www.tldp.org.  i can 
already see, let's say, a multimedia section:

Multimedia
   Sound configuration (OSS, ALSA)
   MP3s
   Playing DVDs
   Digital video

perhaps another section on, say, filesystems:

Filesystems
   Getting NTFS support
   Working with encrypted filesystems
   ...

like i said, i know all this info is out there somewhere, but it's just 
annoyingly hard to get to at times.  you need to go *here* for a HOWTO, 
*there* for a user guide, *there* for the FAQ and *there* for the actual 
RPM.  surely there's a better way to do this.

rday