It turns out that FFmpeg has been accepted as one of Google’s Summer Of Code mentoring organizations. Here is FFmpeg’s page at the SoC site. The team is assembling possible project ideas over at the MultimediaWiki. This could be your one chance to actually make money in directly helping the open source community.
Yearly Archives: 2006
Serious About VC-1
I have a plan, I really do. I am still working hard on Understanding VC-1. Just so that you, the reader and open source multimedia enthusiast understand correctly, this is not so that we can build a new implementation that mirrors the reference implementation 1:1. What I am doing right now is more or less the “phase 1” of this particular documentation effort. Phase 2 is developing a more top-down specification in a similar spirit as my old VP3 format document. Phase 3 is to generate a development roadmap with specific tasks and milestones as well as a number of sample vectors for individual modules which should facilitate initial component validation as well as ease development of SIMD-optimized components.
So you see, phase 1 is where I essentially use the MultimediaWiki as a scratchpad. VC-1 is, like, really big and hard to get one’s head around. This process is helping me.
Part of my plan in all of this is that I am hoping to pawn off the actual writing of code on other people. I know there are people out there — even people reading this blog — who are interested in making some material contribution to open source multimedia. On Monday I learned of Google’s second annual Summer of Code initiative where, in a nutshell, college students can get paid to work on approved open source projects. Since the project as outlined above, with the roadmap and deliverables/milestones, seems ideal for this mentoring concept, I submitted FFmpeg as a project for consideration, albeit a few hours after the formal deadline for doing so. Since the SoC is quite popular, it’s likely that they have all the projects they need.
However, if a student is out there following this blog and interested in working on a very important piece of open source multimedia work, you will have the opportunity starting May 1 to submit an application to work on a project not listed with an official mentoring organization, per this SoC FAQ entry. It’s a long shot, but Google has sponsored more ambitious stuff.
A big task? You bet. But if you follow this blog you’re probably at least minimally qualified to tackle the project.
MySQL Disaster Recovery Works
I just want to briefly recognize MySQL for its resilience and robustness. Even in the event that a table gets corrupted, as happened today with the tables driving the MultimediaWiki, ‘CHECK TABLE’ and ‘REPAIR TABLE’ can diagnose and fix the problem and have your MySQL-backed application up and running in short order. Of course, I also have an automated script backing up the database tables off-site, every night, just for good measure.
I just want any current or future contributors to be secure in the knowledge that the data is safe.
Lagarith And MSU
While raiding Wikipedia for scant pieces of multimedia information they might have that are not yet in the MultimediaWiki, I learned of 2 new lossless video codecs– Lagarith and MSU Lossless Video. I’ve heard people grumble about how lossless video codecs just don’t perform. I know of one grumbler in particular — you know who you are — who claims that FLAC actually outperforms the nominal special-purpose lossless video codec. I am expecting a full report from you on how these new codecs stack up. The MSU technology is proprietary but I have started to document the GPL’d Lagarith codec in the Wiki. The author contributed a write-up of the surface details. I am trying to plod through the control flow. It’s a bit slow-going though since many of the crucial functions are written in MMX-optimized ASM.
In other Wiki news, I finally found a logo:
It is the same one seen on Wikipedia’s multimedia entry and apparently comes from a set of KDE icons made here. I like it.