SoC 2011

Google Summer of Code 2011.

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, x264, the H.264 video encoder, and VLMC. The accepted projects are seen 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.
• 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

Template: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 for 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. Phonon ideas, for KDE/Phonon work.
3. The other ideas are less detailed but could be good ideas too.
4. VLMC ideas
5. 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.