SoC 2007

Thoughts for Google Summer of Code application.

Introduction & Informations

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.

VLC media player

VLC media player is a cross-platform Multimedia player, and encoding and streaming 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 4 millions from the main website (not including third-party distributions (Linux)), which means about 30 million people have downloaded VLC 0.8.5 from the main website!

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

Summer of Code

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

If selected and developed, SoC ideas will be included in the VLC 0.9.1 release, and covered by the GPL licence. 0.9.0, our upcoming release, should be out before the summer.

Ideas

Read this

We (the VideoLAN team, and jb, the author of this page) have split this page in two lists of ideas:

• The main ideas are the ones we would like to focus on, and seem to be key projects for VLC and a lot more thrilling than the other ones; we have assigned a potential mentor to each of these.
• The other ideas are less detailled 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 interfaces for the browsers plug-ins

This project focuses on adding interfaces to our browser plug-ins, in order to have, in the web pages embedded mode, buttons to control VLC media player as in WMP or Youtube player. These buttons need 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 work in concert with some improvements on 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 control VLC playback in fullscreen mode.

With this project, which is not too long, there should be some related work on Vout (Making sure the video output does not close and reopen between files for example...)

Proposed mentor: Not defined yet

Subtitle support

This project would work on the subtitle infrastructure and freetype module in order to read more types of subtitles:

• support for advanced SSA/ASS rendering using libass or asa or any other mean,
• support bold, italic, underline, RGB colors, size changes and font changes for a whole line or part of one line, (not all of these are supported now),
• support for the subtitles HTML tags, and add all the most used subtitles types that are not yet in,
• detecting overlap of two subtitle pictures and moving them so that this is less annoying,
• capability of displaying subtitles with no video enabled for audio books,
• ease the automatic extraction to a filebased format of subtitles. These subtitles can come from videos used in different formats (DVB, line 23...),

Optional related work:

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

Proposed mentor: Dnumgis

Vista acceleration and DirectX improvements

Current versions of VLC media player have a lot of problems on Windows Vista (check the forums for specifics).

We need support for the new EVR (enhanced video renderer) in Windows Vista, and make it the default Video Output module for that OS.

See Windows Vista Video Pipeline Architecture And Implementation and DirectShow Improvements in Vista

Some rework and enhancements of the DirectX and Direct3D Video Output modules may also be necessary.

Proposed mentor: Quovodis

MacOS X and Leopard

There are a few MacOS X specific projects, 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: QTKit Capture API, Resolution independence, iChat Theatre, ...

Proposed mentor : TheDJ

RTSP streaming server

The RTSP server implementation in VLC is inefficient and lacks support for traversal mechanisms. Possible improvements include:

• Support for RTSP interleaved RTP media
• RTSP over HTTP tunneling
• RTCP support on the VLC client side
• Per-asset accounting options
• Profiling and performance improvements of the RTSP, HTTP and RTP server code

Proposed mentor: jpsaman

Other Ideas SoC 2007

Matroska (mkv) muxing

This project is about writing a mkv muxer for VLC with advanced support (chapters, multiple audio and multiple subtitles, etc...) like when you need to rip or archive a DVD.

FFMPEG project has a similar project, and we could use the libavformat muxer and adapt ourselves, but we are not sure if we will be able to use therefore all the advanced features.

robUx4 can do the mentoring. He has already wrote the demux and has worked for matroska, so knows it very well.

VLM Schedule rework

VLM is under rework by fenrir on these days. But a rework of our scheduler and recorder could be an interesting project.

WinCE port

The WinCE port has been broken for some time now before 0.8.4. Reparing the builds of all the external libraries build and making VLC build and work should take some time :D

Then a rework of the interface should happen.

Phonon Back-End

KDE4 will be out with a new framework for multimedia, this year. Using VLC media player as a back-end for phonon would be great!

Mini Projects - More ideas

We have a more general page for ideas for Project in VLC media player, that could give you ideas: Mini_Projects.

Questions? Contact us?

If you need to contact us for any questions, you can:

• use this Talk page,
• use the vlc-devel mailing list,
• come on IRC irc://irc.videolan.org #videolan
• contact one of the mentors,
• or contact Jean-Baptiste Kempf