SoC 2010

Google Summer of Code 2010.

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 .

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 .

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.

Summer of Code

If selected and developed, SoC projects for VLC will be included in later releases. All projects are covered by the GPL licence. (v2+)

Ideas for VLC

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 has some ideas too.

• 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.

Main ideas

Qt pimping

Improve Qt interface, used on linux and windows with use of Qt-Kinetic or plasma.

The basic, primary interface is reasonable but it could be improved in many ways. The (sub)menus and popups need a lot of (re)design, evaluation, Q&A, tinkering, and so on. For example, adding files is cumbersome and repeated adding even more so. Sorting and other displaying options in the playlist would be nice. Error reporting, presentation, and resolution needs improving. For example, import a few audio streams (one or more m3u/pls playlists, perhaps), try to use them, and see what happens when some urls are not available.

Try to borrow the best ideas from amarok, iTunes, WMP, winamp, freeamp and integrate them into VLC.

Look at other Qt applications or KDE applications.

• You need some Qt and C++ knowlegde and a lot of creativity.

Proposed mentor: jb

Assembly optimizations in VLC

If you are fond of writing ASM and you are fluent in MMX/SSE2, there are many interesting things in VLC to speed up.

• Profiling VLC.
• memcpy implementations in SSE* and MMX (see modules/misc/memcpy/fastmemcpy.h)
• 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

Audio Filters

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

• to create or implement new algorithms, like SRS WoW or other 3D effects
• to work on channels mixing,
• to work on tracks mixing,
• to create scriptable new audio filters in lua and enable users to create whatever audio filtering function they want in a Lua script.

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

Proposed mentor: geal

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

Services Discovery, like Jamendo integration

Jamendo, Last.fm and other online music and video services would be great to integrate into VLC.

This project deals with this integration.

• This needs lua, C and C++ programming skills.

Proposed mentor: ?

Flash Streaming

RTMP implementation for streaming to Flash10.

Proposed mentor: jpsaman

Qt embedded interface

VLC uses Qt for its main interfaces on desktop systems. It would be nice to have the same type of UI on systems like Maemo or Windows Mobile.

Proposed mentor: ILEoo

More Ideas

QTKit access

Build a QTKit-based access module for OS X (allowing input from USB / FireWire cameras, audio devices, camcorders, tape recorders [, ...your favourite here] ). This access module will also need a nice component GUI.

This project requires knowlege of C and preferably also Objective C, and interest in video/audio capture devices. Obviously, the student is required to own at a least a Mac with a (embedded) webcam and an audio input facility for development. Knowledge of the QuickTime APIs and previous experience with Cocoa are strong pluses.

Proposed mentor: thedj

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. A right-click context menu with basic commands might be a nice way to get started.

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. There is a proof of concept and a better design can be added later on.

Proposed mentor: jpsaman and jpd

OpenMAX AL bindings for LibVLC

OpenMAX is a portable framework for handling audio, video and pictures.

OpenMAX AL is an API designed to create and control media players, and make them communicate with devices such as audio inputs and outputs, cameras, LEDs, etc. In this project, the student would integrate LibVLC, the VLC framework with OpenMAX.

Proposed mentor: Rémi

DXVA Integration

Since Windows Vista, some nice APIs are available, and you can do fun things like GPU-based decoding. Some good work could be done here.

Proposed mentor: geal

Linux GPU Acceleration Integration

Some nice APIs are available like VAAPI and like XvBA, and you can do fun things like GPU-based decoding.

Proposed mentor: jpsaman

Automated threading error detection

VLC is heavily multithreaded.

This project would involve extending the VLC threading APIs to provide better run-time consistency checks, and possibly proof of correctness.

This could be similar to the lock consistency checking in the Linux kernel, albeit more simple - VLC does not have to deal with interruptions neither atomic operation and has fewer thread and synchronisation constructs.

This project requires working knowledge of the C programming language and POSIX threads.

proposed mentor: ?

Skins improvements

Better video output integration.

Better skin support.

Proposed mentor: ?

SVCD handling

Make SVCD's work. Menu selection, navigation and hot spots.

Proposed mentor: ?

Mini Projects - More ideas

This sections welcomes all Original ideas which can be implemented in a short span of time.However, We have a more general page for ideas for Project in VLC media player, that could give you ideas: Mini_Projects.

Gmail Integration

To Develop a Combination of VLC Patch and a FireFox Extension , working together to set currently Playing track as Custom Message in Gmail Chat.The FireFox Extension will fetch the track Information from VLC instance running and will

• Either, generate an XmlHttpRequest to send the new status to Server.
• Or, Fire the Gmail Eventlisteners accordingly.

The project succesfully completed this way will be Platform Independent.Had it been done through Google Talk Client , it would have been available for Windows users only.Had it been done using VLC<->Google server interaction, it would have required User authentications ,Proxy Handling etc.

Questions? Contact us?

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

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

Mentors

The proposed mentors are:

• jpeg
• remi
• xtophe
• jb
• dionoea
• jpsaman
• jpd

Administrators

• jb
• xtophe