SoC 2020

This page summarizes the current list of ideas for VideoLAN project, for Google Summer Of Code 2020.

The list is not exhaustive, and is not limitative. Feel free to apply with your own idea!

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, VLMC and dav1d (or the libVLC engine).

We have projects in C, C++, ASM, JS, Go, Obj-C, GPU Shaders, C#, Java/Kotlin and Swift.

Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a way for university students to have a paid internship by Google to work on open source projects and become top developers!

VideoLAN was a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

This page lists some ideas for Summer of Code projects on VLMC, libVLC and VLC media player.

VLC & libVLC

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 23 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.

The engine of VLC is libVLC, and is used by VLMC.

VideoLAN Movie Creator

VLMC is a cross-platform non-linear video editing software based on libVLC technology. It was started as a final year student project at the French IT school EPITECH.

VLMC currently awaits a transition to the current libvlc API and it's actual 1.0 release!

Summer of Code

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

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

How to Start

Find an idea

First, you need to find an idea.

This current page gives you a list of ideas. Those ideas are NOT exhaustive: you can bring your own idea! Some of the best ideas we've ever had were custom ideas!

Submit your idea

You need to submit your idea on the Google Summer of Code platform.

You should do so, very quickly, even before having finished compilation and the next steps, so that we can give you early feedback.

Compile libVLC or VLMC

This may sound trivial, but it's harder than many expect. See https://wiki.videolan.org/Category:Building/ for more informations.

You should come on IRC to get help to compile.

Provide a small patch

To demonstrate your skills, share a small patch with us. This will let you become familiar with Git, in case you don't know it already and our process on merging patches.

Let's get in touch

If you have a doubt, are not sure about anything or want clarification, please get in touch with us.

We have 3 major communication channels: Our mailing-lists to discuss patches and further development related topics. Furthermore, we have our web forums for VLC-related end-user support - a VLMC section will be created once the product is published. Finally, there is our IRC channel #videolan (for libVLC) and #vlmc on the Freenode network. It's open to any kind of discussion. Usage issues, questions how to compile VLC/VLMC, getting to know the fellow developers, etc.