SoC 2012

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Google Summer of Code 2012.

This wiki page covers the attempt of the VideoLAN project to become a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code, in order to improve VLC media player, and other VideoLAN projects.


Introduction & Information

VideoLAN was a mentoring organization in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 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 9 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; SoC projects for x264 will be included in the main tree of the project.

All projects are covered by either the GPL or the LGPL licences. (v2+)

Ideas

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 Full Summer of Code project.
  • Original good ideas will be valued. Last year, the best 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.

Key ideas for VLC

New 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, down-mixing and up-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.
  • LADSPA or other libraries integration will be interesting.

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

Qualification task: port any audio filter from MPlayer

Proposed mentor: geal


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 (arriving in vlc 1.2) and transcoding with VLC API.

Proposed mentor: thresh


Assembly optimizations in VLC

If you are fond of writing ASM and you are fluent in MMX/SSE2/SSE4 or NEON, there are many interesting things in VLC to speed up.

  • Profiling VLC.
  • memcpy implementations in NEON, SSE* and MMX (see modules/misc/memcpy/fastmemcpy.h)
  • video filters ASM speedups (see modules/video_filter/blend.cpp)
  • audio filters ASM speedups (see modules/audio_filter/equalizer.c and channel_mixers)
  • Porting other ASM video filters to VLC.

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

Proposed mentor: jb


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 Personnal 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


SVCD/VCD improvements

Menus and other evolved functionnalities needs to be improved and fixed. This requires some old discs.

Proposed mentor: "fenrir"

AirPlay streaming and client

We need to be able to stream everything to and from your iDevices/Mac.

Proposed mentor: "bjustin"

BD-J / BD-Live

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

This project requires a good Java knowledge

Proposed mentor: jb'

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: jetru


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

VLMC

VLMC is a non-linear cross-platform video editor based on VLC. We're looking for student(s) with good C++ skills and some experience with Qt with lots of passion of hacking.

Hang with us at #vlmc or #videolan on irc.freenode.net and talk to the developers directly!

To get selected:

1. Download and build VLMC and start playing with it.

2. Implement some feature(s) or fix some bug(s), search VLMC's bug tracker.

3. Send your patch to vlmc-devel@videolan.org for evaluation and work on your GSoC proposal.

4. Get selected and work on your project!


You'll be greatly appreciated if you complete any of the proposed qualification tasks: (in increasing level of difficulty)

1. Bug 134: Update labels and strings when locale is changed.

2. Bug 61: Improve project timeline widget to have clip thumbnail.

3. Bug 145: Project preview has no sound on Windows.

4. Bug 196: Fix distorted audio playback in project preview.

5. Bug 144: On some platforms, rendered video file has no sound. Identify the problem and fix it.

GUI Improvements

Difficulty: Medium

Proposed mentor: etix

VLMC needs a GUI make over, using Qt APIs such as graphics view, animation, states etc. Correcting those widgets such as the import window, provide alternative widget so VLMC better fits with the video editing needs.

Many widgets can be rewritten : Import, Library, Clip property... be creative !

Quality Improvements: Writing Tests and fixing LibVLC APIs

Difficulty: Hard

Proposed mentor: ? (needs a VLC developer to mentor this one)

While rendering preview and project, VLMC may sometimes crash due to bugs in the libVLC. The project will consist of; writing (unit) tests/test-cases for VLMC/libVLC APIs, and identify what's causing the crashes and fixing the bugs. The major area is rendering. Testing should be verified on at least two of the OSs: Linux, Windows and Mac. This project can help VLMC have stable releases and better quality control.

Plugin Architecture for VLMC

Difficulty: Hard

Proposed mentor: ?

VLMC uses frei0r plugins to add special effects. The project consists of designing and implementing a plugin architecture that can take in lua/python/compiled-plugins(.so) plugins.

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