[www-doc] Rework of the documentation

Clément Stenac zorglub at videolan.org
Sun Oct 3 20:13:55 CEST 2004


Hi,

VLC 0.8.0 is about to be released and our documentation sucks big time :
* VLC user guide is cluttered with useless descriptions of modules, and
only the chapters covering Stream Output and the HTTP interface are
useable. There is no really coherent description of the command line and
nothing about GUI.
* VideoLAN Howto is still usable but heavily out-of-date.

Maybe we could rewrite the user guide into :
* "Playing" or "Client" how-to: small doc with tips like "playing subtitles" etc.
* Streaming how-to: comprehensive streaming guide


Client Howto
------------

- Introduction
    Must be made much smaller than the current one

- Installing VLC  ( but NO compilation information, it's all on the
                    developers site)	/ Exists, need to be simplified /
		    
- Basic usage, using GUI
    - Playing a file, a CD/DVD/VCD, network stream, from a capture card
    - Using the playlist
    - Using subtitles
    - Many useful things that are often asked
    	- Using video/audio filters
	- Multi-monitor setups
	- ...
  / This is completely to be done /

- Advanced usages
    - Command line			/ Largely outdated /
    - HTTP interface   			/ Exists, quite in good shape /
    - Other control interfaces 		/ Todo /
    - Mozilla plugin			/ Exists, completely outdated /


Streaming Howto

- Introduction
    We absolutely need to explain codec/muxer here.

- Comprehensive description of the stream output 
    - How to do it easily with the GUI 
    	- Open/ Stream Output
	- Wizard
    - For Warriors: 
    	-How to make a chain
    	- sout stream modules and their options
    	- direct examples.
    
  /This part already exists in quite a good shape in the user guide it
  only needs to be updated with new options. Examples need to be merged 
  from the videolan howto /

- VLM and VOD			/ Todo /

- Use cases. Basically, it is the same thing as the current VideoLAN
  Howto, but more vlc-centric.
    - Save to file
    - Save to file, with transcoding
    - Stream a file, a disc, from network , ....
    - Multi streaming with vlm

  / This is partly outdated and we should perhaps remove vls for the
  "easy" examples /


This would make (in my opinion) both the user guide and the howto
obsolete, and VLS would still be documented through it's user guide.

Of course this is a lot of work, so we need to get started really soon :).

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome :)

-- 
Anil
Zorglub

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