GSoD 2024

This page summarize the current list of ideas for VideoLAN project, for Google Season of Docs 2024.

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 Season of Docs 2024 in order to improve the VLC User and Developer documentation.

Season of Docs

Google Season of Docs is a way for technical writers to have a paid stipden by Google to work on open source projects and improve their documentation.

VLC is in very big need of documentation, both for developers and end-users, and we're in the progress of revamping all that.

GSoD is run by the same people running the Google Summer of Code program.

VideoLAN was a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, and Every year since 2016 to 2024, as well as And GSoD in 2019 and 2020.

This page list some documentation ideas for both VLC and VLC mobile ports, developer and user-facing documentations.

VLC

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 28 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 documentation of VLC is mostly for end-users using VLC.

libVLC

The engine of VLC is libVLC.

It can be used to do 3rd party applications, media players, or other type of multimedia application.

Its API is documented but is far from being simple to understand. It should be improved.

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 Season of Doc platform.

You should do so, quite quickly, so that we can give you early feedback to improve your submission.

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. Finally, there is our IRC channel #videolan (for libVLC) on the Freenode network. It's open to any kind of discussion. Usage issues, questions how to compile VLC, getting to know the fellow developers, etc.

All our mentors will be on the IRC channel, which is quite active, so it will be easy to find the right person in no time.

Ideas

Continue the Modernization of the VLC user documentation

Project description:

The new VLC media player user documentation [1] has been initiatied during GSoD_2019, and consolidated with GSoD_2020. We need to go further.

It is based on the sphinx Read the Docs open source initiative [2].

It is starting to be usable, but it would be very handy if it could be complete for VLC 3.X before starting to switch to the completely new 4.0 version.

Tasks to do:

• Finish the remaining parts
• Fix the small errors in the documentation
• Prepare for 4.0 release
• Prepare options and module documentation, so that developers can help filling them in
• Prepare for translations
• Improve the desktop FAQ and search engine

Requirements: Goodwill and love for your users.

Proposed mentor: J-b, Simon, Alex

Continue the Modernization of the VLC user documentation for mobile ports (Android or iOS)

Project description:

The new VLC media player user documentations for both Android [3] and iOS [4] has been started with GSoD_2020. But we need some help to make them completely shine.

Although both are based on the same technology as the main Desktop documentation project that supports responsive presentation, mobile end-users expect to have a style and UX experience far closer to the operating system they are using.

This idea is actually 2 ideas, one for Android, one for iOS.

Tasks to do:

• Improve the navigation structure for each mobile OS documentation
• Make the documentation respectively more "Android style" or "iOS style" friendly
• Write the documentation to fit mobile versions of VLC
• Improve each FAQ and global search engine
• Screenshot from mobile version

Requirements: Goodwill and love for your users. also, either an iOS or an Android device

Proposed mentor: J-b, Diogo, Felix (iOS), Aza, Duncan, Simon (Android)

Improve libVLC developer documentation

Project description:

libVLC is the engine of VLC and can be used by 3rd party application for documentation. It is the core of our technologies, and is used a lot.

Currently the libVLC API is precisely documented, for each API call; but it is lacking a higher level document on how to use it, with samples and examples, and how to use that for other development languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Obj-C, etc..).

It is also missing some introduction on the capabilities of the engine.

Therefore, libVLC can be hard to use, when you are starting a project, and this is quite damaging for the developers using libVLC.

Tasks to do:

• Understand the usage of libVLC on the different platforms and its capabilities;
• Write high-level documentation of the different libVLC classes;
• Write samples that matches those classes;
• Prepare to get cross-language samples in the documentation, a bit like MSDN;
• Write introductions to libVLC usage.

Proposed mentor: J-b, Alex, Marvin

Improve VLCKit (libVLC binding for macOS) documentation

Project description:

Currently the VLCKit code base is documented but some part is now outdated and needs to be updated.

Indeed, it will be beneficial for VLCKit to have and overview of it's current documentation and update it if needed.

Tasks to do:

• Understand the usage of VLCKit on the different platforms (iOS, macOS)
• Study exposed VLCKit methods
• Check current documentation if outdated
• Add documentation necessary
• Update the documentation rendering method(maybe something else than Doxygen?)

Requirements: This project is easier with Objective-C knowledge.

Proposed mentor: Felix, Maxime, J-b