trickier with fedora as redhat ( a us registered company) are paranoid about patent infringement so cripple its multimedia capabilities. Cant get codecs from the official repos.
Try several Distro and see which one work best for you and stick to that. Thats how I settled with Ubuntu and its work great on my 7 years old notebook. Take a look at this website
http://ubuntuforums.org for more info.