Outreachy Summer 2015

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.

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.

Outreachy Summer 2015

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

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

VLC Ideas 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 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

This may sound trivial, but it's harder than many expect. VLC's compilation chain is different for every operating system. It doesn'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, getting to know the fellow developers, etc.

Key ideas for VLC

CC EIA-708 Closed Caption support

Following up with the recent developments in the US, we need full support for CEA-708.

We will extend our support for EIA-608 in VLC 2.1, so a base is laid, which needs to be expanded and improved.

Requires good C experience.

Proposed mentor: jb

Timed Text TTML support

Based on the W3C specification, we need support for Timed Text Markup Language to display widely formatted text in time with video or / and audio. If time allows, this project should be expanded to add support for SMPTE-TT's additional elements.

Requires good C experience and a feeling for web technologies.

Proposed mentor: jb

UPNP DLNA Server and Client

Test and fix service discovery module for UPNP/DLNA shares done by software (mediatomb, xbmc, etc) and hardware implementations.

Provide DLNA plugin for DLNA server compliant with opensource (xbmc, djmount, etc) and proprietary (PS3, xbox360, etc) DLNA clients. Some of the work is already done by previous SoC students.

The plugin must be smart enough to provide "presets" for known DLNA media clients with limited features (PS3 or XBOX360 for starters) which require additional quirks or hacks or items to be transcoded or streamed.

Requires some VLC knowledge as the project will involve using Media Library and transcoding with VLC API.

Proposed mentors: thresh, mirsal

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: bhaisaab/rohityadav

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

Native Emotion integration

Emotion is the Evas multimedia widget. It currently uses a number of backends and has a partial integration with VLC. Tasks:

• Improve the integration to be on par with the gstreamer one
• Write an example player using EmotionVLC

Proposed mentor: lu_zero

XML fast and small implementation

The goal of this project is to write a new XML backend, based on a smaller library than the full libxml2. Speed would be nice, but code size matters here. Beware: we need to have a stream-XML based API, not a DOM one.

This project requires good knowledge of C.

Proposed mentor: etix

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 will drop for the existing NPAPI architecture.

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

Other Ideas for VLC

WTV support

Wtv format support Proposed mentor: ???

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

VLM UI for the Mac OS X interface

Implement an easy-to-use, yet customizable and complete UI for the VideoLAN Media Manager, which allows VLC to stream multiple unicast, multicast and Video-on-Demand streams within a single instance. You will need a Mac running OS X 10.6 or later and Cocoa programming experience. A basic understanding of media streams is definitely preferable. Note that this task is too small for an entire summer and should be combined with another topic. Proposed mentor: feepk

Improve messages display

When VLC has a problem opening or playing files it shows a messages window on top of the player with the error. This can be annoying if the screen is being controlled remotely as the user has to manually dismiss the message. There are various ways this could be improved:

1. Update UI so that messages window will auto-dismiss after x seconds unless it is clicked on (this could be optional behaviour). Clicking on the window would cancel the countdown. If the window was selected from the menu, it would not auto-dismiss.
2. Mac OS: Display messages using notification system (if available). Clicking on the notification would open the messages window.

Suggested by : Confused Vorlon. Proposed mentor: feepk

BD-J / BD-Live VLC integration

This is a project to work on Bly-Ray menus and interactivity improvements.

This project requires a correct C and Java knowledge

Proposed mentor: hpi and j-b.

Support for HTTP Dynamic Streaming (F4M)

We need to be able to read Flash Media Manifests (also known as F4M) according to this spec.

Proposed mentor: fyhuel

Porting Audio Filters

We are looking for a skilled audiophile that knows a lot about audio theory and practice:

• to port open source algorithm for audio filters to VLC.

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

Proposed mentor: geal