Monthly Archives: March 2007

SoC Application Deadline

The deadline for students to submit an application to Google’s Summer of Code, 2007 Edition looms. Tomorrow, March 24th, is it. If you are interested in participating in FFmpeg for the SoC, go here to apply. The FFmpeg project does have the qualification requirement this year. However, that does not need to be done by tomorrow. You still have about 2 weeks to complete that.

Update: As noted by Monsieur Swain in the comments, the deadline Google has extended the application deadline to March 26th.

Covox ADPCM

Trixter, who’s interested in even older multimedia formats than I am, has unearthed utilities to compress special ADPCM variants used by the Covox Sound Master. The formats include 2-, 3- and 4-bit ADPCM formats. For anyone interested in trying to reverse engineer the details of these obscure formats (and I know you’re out there), check out this directory at the samples site. It has PCM samples compressed in the various formats along with the DOS-based compression utility used. Also, there is a programming library that has C code to interface to a binary library module that handles the meat of the codec operations.

Happy RE’ing.

SoC Multimedia

I became curious how many other multimedia-related open source projects were competing with FFmpeg for students in Google’s Summer of Code 2007. There is quite an assortment of 3D modelers, audio editors and players, and games on the list. Among them:

SoC ’07

As in 2006, Google has once again accepted FFmpeg as a mentoring organization in their Summer of Code. For review, this is the program that last year sponsored Kostya’s work on an open source VC-1 decoder implementation for FFmpeg. We have been signing up a great crew of mentors and have a number of interesting projects lined up on the Summer of Code 2007 page on the MultimediaWiki.


Summer of Code

However, we on the FFmpeg project recognize that multimedia is a tough area and the summer may not provide enough time to really come up to speed on multimedia technology and complete an involved multimedia-related project. Thus, we have prepared a list of qualification tasks on the MultimediaWiki page. These are fairly straightforward mini-projects that should be simple to someone at least marginally skilled in the art. We would like to see an SoC candidate complete one of the tasks in order to qualify for a coveted SoC project. If you are interested in applying, please move quickly as the student application deadline is March 24, 2007.

If you have any questions about this, you can email me privately or subscribe and post to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list. Good luck!