Outreachy May 2016

This wiki page covers the work of the VideoLAN project as a mentoring organization for Outreachy the successor of the Outreach Program for Women, in order to improve VLC media player and VLMC.

To find generic information about the Outreachy program, please see the official website.

Eligibility: The program is open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people in addition to people of color from groups underrepresented in technology in the United States.

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 40 millions from the main website and that's not including third-party distributions (like Linux, BSD, Android or iOS)!

You can find more information on VLC on Wikipedia or on this wiki.

VideoLAN Movie Creator

VLMC is a cross-platform non-linear video editing software based on VLC 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!

Outreachy May 2016

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

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

VLC and VLMC Idea categories

You should really read this

This page is split in three lists of ideas:

1. The main ideas are what seem to be key projects for VLC or VLMC 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 a full project.

Original good ideas will be valued. We don't want to impose anything. This is Free and Open Source software.

If you don't want to apply for Outreachy but want other ideas to develop on, check the Mini Projects page!

And on the IRC channel #videolan on the Freenode Network, you can have even more ideas.

Getting started

Compile VLC or VLMC

This may sound trivial, but it's harder than many expect. VLC's and VLMC's compilation chains are different for every operating system. They don't really use the default toolchains on Windows or OS X, but a simple *nix like ./configure && make doesn't really do the trick either. We have plenty of information available on this wiki and we will happily provide help on our IRC channel.

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

We have 3 major communication channels at VideoLAN. Our mailing-lists to discuss patches and further development related topics. Furthermore, we have our web forums for end-user support. This means 2 things: 1) people using VLC media player on any operating system 2) people using libvlc or the VLC web plugin in their own applications or installations. Finally, there is our IRC channel #videolan on the Freenode network. It's open to any kind of discussion. Usage issues, questions how to compile VLC or VLMC, getting to know the fellow developers, etc.

How to apply?

The application process for the May 2016 rout will open on February 16, 2015 and application deadline is March 22 (no exceptions!). Please submit your application on the official program website. Previously, please check the eligibility requirements :-)

Key ideas for VLMC

Implement a real Audio/Video sync

So far, the lip-syncing strategy used by VLMC is pretty much "hope it works".

As you would think, this quite often leads to desync, and thus makes VLMC unusable.

We need to come up with a real synchronization strategy, quite likely based on an abstract clock & PTS

Proposed mentor: chouquette

Plug-in new libvlcpp & medialibrary

VLMC uses a from-sratch C++ binding to libvlc, which is stuck a few years in the past. Meanwhile, a new binding got written (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libvlcpp/tree/master), and needs to be plugged in.

We also started working on a cross-platform media library, to replace the low-featured one, present in VLMC.

This media library will handle discovering media for the used, instead of having to manually importing every single file. This should also allow us to kill some of the "Backend" code, as a fair share of it is designed to create thumbnails. This is now done by the medialibrary, and can go away from the VLMC source code.

This probably requires a good C++ knowledge, as both libvlcpp & medialibrary make a heavy use of C++11 & templates meta-programming.

Proposed mentor: chouquette

Import/Save to/from cloud services

It would be a great addition to VLMC to be able to import some medias from a cloud service, and being able to export the result to another.

Since there are so many different cloud providers, we would like to have a "libcloudstorage" that would handle all the boilerplate out of VLMC's source code.

This lib can then easily be used to allow the user to use multiple service.

The cherry on the top would be to integrate this lib cloud storage into the medialibrary project, in order to automatically discover & analyze media stored on the cloud.

Proposed mentor: jb, chouquette

Remote UI

We would like to have a way to use VLMC from a web browser. You can easily imagine having a nice, shiny & simple UI for minimal movie edition, which would go hand in hand with the cloud storage feature.

This task aims toward the uncoupling of the rendering backend & UI, as the renderer will run server side, while the UI runs on the client side.

The idea is to be able to have a UI interacting with the renderer without having to be in the same process, or even machine.

Proposed mentor: jb, chouquette, fkuehne

Unit tests

VLMC is *not* tested.

Well, it is, but manually, which is not good enough. There are many race conditions, crash, deadlocks yet to be discovered.

The UI also has some fairly funky behavior when being stressed out, and that needs to be tested as well.

This task is about writing a unit test suite for both the renderers & the UI. Most likely, this will mean adding some mocking machinery, and therefor hiding all our classes behind an API.

This task is definitely a requirement before we are able to clean & modernize the code base!

Proposed mentor: chouquette

Key ideas for VLC

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
• 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, flx42

Advanced Audio Filters

We are looking for a skilled audiophile that knows a lot about audio theory and practice to work on new audio filters.

Notably:

• SRS WoW like or other 3D effects;
• channels mixing, notably upmixing, like Prologic-II;
• tracks mixing, and transitions;
• 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.

This project needs some good audio knowledge and good C experience.

Qualification task: port any audio filter from MPlayer

Proposed mentor: geal

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: ??

AirPlay streaming

We need to be able to stream everything to your Google TV, Apple TV or raspberrypi powered shairport service. Airport is an non-open protocol that allows wireless streaming of audio, video, multimedia to supported devices.

The tasks would consist of:

• Understanding how AirPlay works, try with any device if available.
• Configure a test setup using raspberrypi or your own computer or any TV device if available, play with couple of available players who support AirPlay. This is just to get a feel of what it is you will be trying to implement for vlc-android.
• Study couple of opensource implementations like shairport
• Run/test/deploy VLC on simulator or android device
• Implement an AirPlay aout that would stream audio to your AirPlay supported device (shairport with rpi/computer or Apple TV or Google TV)
• Test with couple of android devices if available, ask mentors and community to test, report bugs, suggestions
• Study how video works, vout for vlc works, if have time implement video streaming as well.

Proposed mentor: ??

VLC Sync Play across devices

By leveraging zeroconf and rtsp make possible to decode in sync in multiple devices a video stored in one. Tasks:

• Implement a simple protocol for discovery and announce
• Implement the discovery system
• At least one of the following
  • Provide a UI for Qt (Windows / Linux)
  • Provide a UI for Android
  • Provide a UI for OS X

Proposed mentor: lu_zero

Port VLC's NPAPI web plugin to PPAPI

We need to support the PPAPI interfaces this summer to keep playback support within Google Chrome, since they dropped the existing NPAPI architecture. A proof-of-concept was developed already, but needs refactoring, polishing and testing.

Requires good C or/and C++ knowledge and a basic understanding of web browser internals. The ability to test on more than one platform would be a very strong plus.

Proposed Mentor: feepk

Add Owncloud, MEGA and Yandex.Disk cloud support to VLC for iOS

Following the success of our native integration with Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box, we want to integrate with Owncloud, MEGA and Yandex.disk, which are the last remaining major cloud services left to add! :)

Requires good Objective-C and optionally swift knowledge as well as a basic understanding of cloud services and network programming. Additionally, requires a Mac running OS X 10.10 or later.

Proposed Mentor: feepk

Add proper audio playback UI to VLC for iOS

VLC for iOS is a recognized and well known video player. Few people know that it is actually capable of playing music and podcasts, too and there is a reason for that. The UI is not really suitable for it. Make it so!

Requires good Objective-C and optionally swift knowledge as well as basic design skills. Additionally, requires a Mac running OS X 10.10 or later.

Proposed Mentor: feepk

Other Ideas for VLC

DVD audio support

Very difficult project for Audio fans Proposed mentor: jb

Device synchronisation

Sync your mp3 player with the media library Proposed mentor: ???

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