SoC 2011

Google Summer of Code 2011.

This wiki page covers the work of the VideoLAN project as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code, in order to improve VLC media player, x264, the H.264 video encoder, and VLMC.

Accepted projects can be found on a separate page.

Introduction & Information

This wiki page covers the attempt by the VideoLAN project to act as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code, in order to improve VLC media player and X264, the H.264 video encoder.

VideoLAN was a mentoring organization in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

• This page list the ideas for VLC and VLMC
• There is also a separate page for project ideas for X264: SoC x264 2011.

If you are a student, please read the rules and advice.

VLC media player

VLC media player is a cross-platform multimedia player, encoder and streamer application. It is one of the most successful open-source projects without any professional structure underneath.

VLC media player is downloaded at an approximate monthly rate of 5 millions from the main website and that's not including third-party distributions (Linux)!

You can find more information on VLC on Wikipedia or on this wiki.

x264

x264 is probably the most popular open source video compression software, used worldwide for applications such as web video, television broadcast, and Blu-ray authoring. It outclasses practically all commercial implementations both speed and compression-wise. While not actually part of VLC or ffmpeg, it is a major library used by both, licensed under the GPL. Due to its popularity in the commercial world (for example, Youtube and Facebook rely on it), many companies have offered bounties in the past for features and improvements that they found useful.

Summer of Code

If selected and developed, SoC projects for VLC will be included in later releases; SoC projects for x264 will be included in the main tree of the project.

All projects are covered by the GPL licence. (v2+)

Ideas

VLC and VLMC

Read this

This page is split in three lists of ideas:

1. The main ideas are what seem to be key projects for VLC and should be more thrilling than the other ones; we have assigned a potential mentor to each of these.
2. The other ideas are less detailed but could be good ideas too.
3. VLMC ideas
4. Mini Projects are short-span projects which can be given as Qualification tasks or extended to be Full Summer of Code project.

• Original good ideas will be valued. Last year, half of the ideas were given by students. We don't want to impose anything. This is free and Open Source software.

If you don't want to apply for SoC but want other ideas to develop on, check the Mini Projects page!

And on the IRC channel, you can have even more ideas.

Ideas for x264

For x264 ideas, please see SoC x264 2011.

Key ideas for VLC

New Audio Filters

We are looking for a skilled audiophile that knows a lot about audio theory and practice:

• to create or implement new algorithms, like SRS WoW or other 3D effects
• to work on channels mixing,
• to work on tracks mixing,
• to create scriptable new audio filters in lua and enable users to create whatever audio filtering function they want in a Lua script.
• LADSPA or other libraries integration will be interesting.

This project needs some good audio knowledge and good C experience.

Qualification task: port any audio filter from MPlayer

Proposed mentor: geal

Porting Audio Filters

We are looking for a skilled audiophile that knows a lot about audio theory and practice:

• to port open source algorithm for audio filters to VLC.

This project needs some good audio knowledge and good C experience.

Proposed mentor: geal

UPNP DLNA Server and Client

Test and fix service discovery module for UPNP/DLNA shares done by software (mediatomb, xbmc, etc) and hardware implementations.

Provide DLNA plugin for DLNA server compliant with opensource (xbmc, djmount, etc) and proprietary (PS3, xbox360, etc) DLNA clients. Some of the work is already done by previous SoC students.

The plugin must be smart enough to provide "presets" for known DLNA media clients with limited features (PS3 or XBOX360 for starters) which require additional quirks or hacks or items to be transcoded or streamed.

Requires some VLC knowledge as the project will involve using Media Library (arriving in vlc 1.2) and transcoding with VLC API.

Proposed mentor: thresh

Assembly optimizations in VLC

If you are fond of writing ASM and you are fluent in MMX/SSE2/SSE4, there are many interesting things in VLC to speed up.

• Profiling VLC.
• memcpy implementations in SSE* and MMX (see modules/misc/memcpy/fastmemcpy.h)
• video filters ASM speedups (see modules/video_filter/blend.c)
• audio filters ASM speedups (see modules/audio_filter/equalizer.c)
• Porting other ASM video filters to VLC.

This project needs some good ASM knowledge and good C experience.

• Stuff to read: http://www.agner.org/optimize/

Proposed mentor: jb

VLC Android Port

Improve current VLC android port, improve/add native/java interfaces and design and implement a GUI. The project can be broken into:

• Build libvlc jni, understand LibVlc.
• Design and implement a cool GUI with gestures and using LibVlc implement callbacks, map user events etc.

Proposed mentors: ivoire

VLC Test Suite

This project aims at making automatic tests to improve VLC quality.

• Write a series of tests for vlc-internal
• Integrate a framework for automated plugins testing with the automake build system
• Automate the different codec playback/mux/etc tests
• Automate the subtitles tests
• Write tests for the different bindings: Mac OS X Framework/Python Bindings... etc.

This project is a code project, require good knowledge of C

Proposed mentor: Rémi

VLC Personnal Cloud Project 2.0

The personal cloud project is a simple project to allow people to play their media files anywhere in the world.

Through the http interface of VLC, a user can:

• list the medias from the Media Library,
• play those medias,
• those medias get transcoded and streamed in:
  • Flash
  • Silverlight
  • iPhone format
  • Android format
  • html5
  • A VLC webplugin

A good example of the aim is http://www.vodobox.c.la/

This project has to work on the configuration and NAT traversal.

This projects needs knowledge in HTML and JS; it might require C coding.

Proposed mentor: jb

VLC for Anime

We are looking for a skilled anime fan that knows a lot about anime theory and practice to work on the optimisation of VLC for anime. Ideas include:

• Improvement of MKV demuxer for special anime needs
• Subtitles display improvements
• video filters that make sense for anime
• metadata and extensions.

Proposed mentor: jb

SVCD/VCD improvements

Menus and such needs to be improvements and fixed.

Proposed mentor: "fenrir"

Automatic LibVLC bindings generation

libVLC can be used from several programming languages like Java or python to embbed VLC feature inside another application. Anyway, maintaining these binding is power consuming. VLC needs a way to automatically generate theses binding for a large set of programming languages and keep them up-to-date easily. We advice to use Swig (from http://www.swig.org/) but any other tool is accepted too.

• Generator of libVLC bindings for other languages

Proposed mentor: ivoire

OMA/Atrac improvements

We need to improve the oma demuxer to support more features and work on the ATRAC3+ decoder in libavcodec, so people can play their files from MiniDiscs.

Proposed mentors: Adrian, Michael or other people from linux-minidisc

Playlist improvements

We need to reinforce the media library capabilities and its integration with external metadata sources, notably for TV shows.

Proposed mentor: jetru

AirTune streaming

We need to be able to stream everything to your iPhone.

Proposed mentor

BD-J / BD-Live

This is a project to go on the work of last year on Blu-Ray Menus

This project requires Java knowledge

Proposed mentor: jb'

Http interface improvements

This is a project to fix and extend the http inteface (also called oldhttp)

The http interface is used by many remote control apps on various platforms. This project would improve the capability of the interface - and thus enable more features in the various remotes that use it.

• get the album art working
  • the interface is supposed to return the current album art at /art (assuming 'export album art' is enabled)
  • at the moment, this simply doesn't work.
• enable playlist re-ordering
  • at the moment, there is no way in the http interface for the playlist order to be changed
• enable access to the graphical equaliser
  • should provide a list of presets available
  • should provide info on each slider
  • should allow user to select a preset
  • should allow user to adjust a slider
• speed control
  • allow speed to be set in the form host:8080/requests/status.xml?command=speed&val=<someVal>
  • show current speed as part of the status.xml response
• subtitle delay control
  • (similar to speed control)
• audio delay control
  • (similar to speed control)
• enable selection of a subtitle file (by path)
• add 'unminimise' command to the fullscreen command
  • the current fullscreen command just sets the bool value of fullscreen in VLC. However if vlc is minimised on Ubuntu (possibly windows), then fullscreen does nothing. To work as the user would expect, the command=fullscreen should a) set fullscreen b) unminimise VLC
• add ability to control picture controls (brightness, contrast, etc)
• implement pl_delete on luahttp
• allow user to get drives list on windows (in oldHttp, user can browse to c:/..)

• and lots more...

Proposed mentor: confusedVorlon

Other Ideas for VLC

WTV support

Wtv format support Proposed mentor: Laurent

DVD audio support

Very difficult project for Audio fans Proposed mentor: jb

Device synchronisation

Sync your mp3 player with the media library Proposed mentor: jetru

HD DVD support

Very difficult project for someone having the right hardware Proposed mentor: jb

Multi-Angle DVD support

We need multi-angle DVD support Proposed mentor: Meuuh

VLC Student Proposals

Mobile Remote Control

(proposed by akashm1990)

The aim is to make a mobile remote control application for VLC running on the PC. This would be a native application.

The application will run on a mobile phone connected to the local network over WiFi.(probably using the http interface)

In addition to the usual remote control functionalities such as play,pause, open new file,volume control,etc. the application aims to implement 2 specific functionalities:

• On receiving an incoming call, if a video is playing on the PC, it will pause, or if music is playing, the volume may reduce. (user configurable)
  
• On receiving an incoming text message, the video playing on screen is paused and the text is displayed onscreen. After a predetermined period of time, the video starts playing again.
  

Target Platforms: Android(primary), Symbian-QT (If time permits)

A video showing the auto pause functionality using Android emulators and the VLC Python API is shown here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou5prh-EoBs

VLMC

VLMC is a non-linear cross-platform video editor based on VLC. We're looking for student(s) with good C++ skills and some experience with Qt with lots of passion of hacking.

Hang with us at #vlmc or #videolan on irc.freenode.net and talk to the developers directly!

To get selected:

1. Download and build VLMC and start playing with it.

2. Implement some feature(s) or fix some bug(s), search VLMC's bug tracker.

3. Send your patch to vlmc-devel@videolan.org for evaluation and work on your GSoC proposal.

4. Get selected and work on your project!

You'll be greatly appreciated if you complete any of the proposed qualification tasks: (in increasing level of difficulty)

1. Bug 134: Update labels and strings when locale is changed.

2. Bug 61: Improve project timeline widget to have clip thumbnail.

3. Bug 145: Project preview has no sound on Windows.

4. Bug 196: Fix distorted audio playback in project preview.

5. Bug 144: On some platforms, rendered video file has no sound. Identify the problem and fix it.

GUI Improvements

Difficulty: Medium

Proposed mentor: etix

VLMC needs a GUI make over, using Qt APIs such as graphics view, animation, states etc. Correcting those widgets such as the import window, provide alternative widget so VLMC better fits with the video editing needs.

Many widgets can be rewritten : Import, Library, Clip property... be creative !

Quality Improvements: Writing Tests and fixing LibVLC APIs

Difficulty: Hard

Proposed mentor: ? (needs a VLC developer to mentor this one)

While rendering preview and project, VLMC may sometimes crash due to bugs in the libVLC. The project will consist of; writing (unit) tests/test-cases for VLMC/libVLC APIs, and identify what's causing the crashes and fixing the bugs. The major area is rendering. Testing should be verified on at least two of the OSs: Linux, Windows and Mac. This project can help VLMC have stable releases and better quality control.

Plugin Architecture for VLMC

Difficulty: Hard

Proposed mentor: ?

VLMC uses frei0r plugins to add special effects. The project consists of designing and implementing a plugin architecture that can take in lua/python/compiled-plugins(.so) plugins.