SoC 2013

SoC 2013 ideas.

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.

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.

VideoLAN was a mentoring organization in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

• This page list the ideas for VLC

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.

Summer of Code

If selected and developed, SoC projects for VLC will be included in later releases.

All projects are covered by the GPL (v2+) or LGPL (v2.1+) licenses depending on the module and student wishes.

Ideas

VLC

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. 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.

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 the current VLC for Android.

Proposed mentors: ?

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 Personal 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

Playlist improvements

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

Proposed mentor: jetru

AirPlay streaming

We need to be able to stream everything to your Apple TV.

Proposed mentor

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