Are non-production video and audio questions on topic here?

Question

We've been getting a few questions lately that are audio and video related, but aren't primarily about audio and video production.

I'm talking about questions like:

• What should I look for in good headphones?
• Send audio linux -> mac
• Hardware/software to project video wirelessly?
• What are the various desktop streaming softwares for justin.tv and the likes?

I think of these in the same way I would think of "home theater" questions - yes they're about audio and video, but they aren't really "for engineers, producers, editors, and enthusiasts spanning the fields of audio, video, and media creation" as presently defined in our FAQ.

I want to hear from the community about these. Do we want these kinds of questions here? This seems to be the obvious place to ask them since there's an expectation that our community would know the answers, but that makes us more into a general A/V site than a production-oriented site. More Super User than Stack Overflow, if you will. It's different than I personally would expect. I would rather ask the community than just immediately remove them from the site.

What do you all think? All of these questions have some merit. The question is, do they have merit here.

UPDATE: It's been a while since I chimed in, but I think it's fairly clear from this question that nobody who's speaking up wants these questions here. Unless there's further debate I'm going to be closing non-production, "home theater" or "audiophile" type questions and directing people to the Home Theater proposal that Flimsy linked.

Answer 1

I'd say unless there's at least some semblance of a defensible connection to production in the question, they should be discouraged.

We certainly don't want this degenerating into a generic "home audio video" Q&A...

Answer 2

I would like to see this stay focused on A/V production. Perhaps there should be a separate site for home theater and related CE gear.

Some of those questions do have relevance for A/V production, though, while also still being of general-purpose interest. But likewise they also have relevance for a bunch of other Stack Exchange sites as well.

Answer 3

Old question I know...

Nope

Where it certainly used to be the case that A/V production was largely in the domain of commercial and professional engineers/producers, etc., and therefore questions would likely be easy to identify (I'm generalizing, but you know what I mean), the explosion of consumer/pro-sumer production hardware and software seriously blurs this line.

Upon first glance, the question titles listed above could all certainly pertain to production. If the OPs were interested even in faking it lol, they could be on topic. And upon reading the questions, some tried to fake it, some not so much.

I would say that it is probably very easy to offer, in Jeff's terms, some semblance of a defensible connection to production. Given the ease with which a question could be made to make a connection to production, if a question really cannot make a case, it shouldn't be here.

Answer 4

I think a distinction should be made between questions whose answers won't be relevant to issues of production and those which will.

Take this question: Does using component cable help improve video quality?

It is on hold as off-topic, at the time of my writing. Although the specific circumstances of the questioner relate to his home theater use, the clarification of principle sought will be useful to someone who's digitizing video fed as an analog signal. This SE page may come up for someone searching for the same clarification and is certainly on-topic at VP. So, basically a call for some leeway to be applied when the answer(s) to the question are relevant for production purposes.

Answer 5

Noting that the other proposal failed to gain enough activity and also noting that things seem a bit slow when talking A/V Production only. I'm not sure if it wouldn't be beneficial to expand the definition slightly. On the one hand, there is a distinction and we don't want to be overwhelmed by home questions, but there are also a lot of concepts that work for both home and production users. Questions about signals and signal processing for example could be on topic for either, even if it is asked in a home theater context.

The main thing I don't have an answer for is how we handle that there are questions in either category that are not useful to people in the other category. That I don't have any good answer for.