SoC 2007

Reflexions for Google Summer of Code applications.

Introduction & Informations

This wiki page deals with VideoLAN attempt to be a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code to improve VLC media player.

VLC media player

VLC media player is a Multimedia player, encoder and streamer platform independant application. It is one of the best succesfull open-source project without any profesional structure underneath.

VLC media player is downloaded at an approximate rate of 4 millions every month from the main website (does not include unofficial mirrors and package distribution), which means about 30 millions people have downloaded VLC 0.8.5 from the main website!

You can have more information on Wikipedia or on this wiki

Summer of Code

We would like to be a mentoring organisation (mentors on SoC Website).

If selected and developed, SoC ideas will be included in VLC media player 0.9.1, under the GPL licence. 0.9.0, next version of VLC should be out before the summer.

Ideas

Read this

We (the VideoLAN team, and jb, the writer of this page) have architectured this page in two main lists of idea:

• The first ones are the one we would like to focus on, and seems key projects for VLC and a lot more fun than the others; we have affected potential mentors to these projects.
• and other ones that are less detailed but could be good ideas too.

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, check the Mini Projects page!

Main ideas

GUI intfs for the browsers plug-ins

This project focuses on adding interfaces to our browsers plug-in, in order to have, in the web pages embedded mode, buttons to control VLC media player as WMP or Youtube player have. These buttons needs to be cross-platform and cross-browsers.

The second part of this project aims to provide a replacement for all preconfigured media players embedded in web pages, if possible.

For example, when a webpage asks for WMP embedded plugin, youtube player, quicktime player or any other, VLC would detect the stream and display it. This would mean less CPU needed than Flash based players...

This project may need to redesign a bit the cache handling module access.

The look of the interface should not be a problem (it can be added later on).

Proposed mentor: Quovodis.

Fullscreen Controller

This project is easy to describe, it would provide a fullscreen controller for Linux/Unix and Windows, as VLC media player already has on MacOS X version since 0.8.6.

It should be draggable, clickable and support the classical control buttons to interfere with VLC in fullscreen mode.

With this project, which is not too long, there should be some related work on Vout (non-flickering changes for example...)

Proposed mentor: Not defined yet

Subtitle support

This project would rework the subtitle infrastructure and freetype module in order to read more subtitles:

• support bold, italic, underline, RGB colors, size changes and font changes for a whole line or part of one line, (partial now)
• support for the subtitles HTML tags, and add all the most used subtitles types that are not yet in, (almost complete now)
• support for SSA/ASS using libass or asa or any other mean, (not existing today)
• capability of displaying two different subtitles, with no overlap,
• capability of displaying subtitles with no video enabled for audio books,
• ease the automatic extraction of subtitles from files.

Optionnal related work:

• capability of moving the subtitles in the picture (freetype renderer),
• support for Karaoke subtitles ( :D )

Vista acceleration and DirectX improvements

VLC media player has a lot of problems on Windows Vista, now.

There should be support for the new EVR for rendering in windows Vista and make it the default Video Output module for Vista. http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/MED134_WH06.ppt http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms788119.aspx

Some rework and ameliorations of DirectX Video Output modules may be necessary too.

Proposed mentor: Quovodis

MacOS X and Leopard

There are a few MacOS X specific work, especially for Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)

• Creation a VLC media player framework that can be used by both VLC.app and VLCplugin.bundle to integrate better with other Mac applications
• Adapt and use Leopard enhancements in VLC media player

Proposed mentor : TheDJ

Other Ideas SoC 2007

BDA Drivers

and TV stuffs for windows

Subtitles support

SSA, freetype, whatever

Preferrably incorporating either the libass (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libass/) or asa (http://asa.diac24.net/Main_Page) libraries instead of writing our own.

OSX Leopard support

especially: QTKit Capture API, Resolution independence, iChat Theatre

Mac OS X Framework

Create a VLC framework that can be used by both VLC.app and VLCplugin.bundle. (Trac Ticket #739)

Matroska (mkv) muxing

robUx4 can do the mentoring. He already wrote the demux and knows mkv really well. Sounds like a nice SoC subject. http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=33015

Hint MP4/MOV Files

Add video and audio hint tracks as the output file is muxed. Resulting files can be streamed from RTSP server with trickplay, like DSS/QTSS. Probably requires use of GPAC libraries.

Extract Subtitles

It would be great to have an easy way to extract subtitles from all the types of embedding used in different formats of video streams. DVB, line 23, etc. Google could be interested because it's a really hard, but discrete task. And who wouldn't like search google videos with text.