Yearly Archives: 2007

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.

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!

Backdoor Data

I have been poking at RealVideo 4 lately. Who knows? We might be able to make a Google Summer of Code project out of it. If the FFmpeg project is accepted for the 2007 season.

Here’s a curious artifact I found: A method called Decoder::getBackdoorOptions(). The function turns out to be a NOP, though. In the original source, I imagine the guts were protected by an “#ifdef DEBUG…#endif” pair.

Robots Of The 80s, Part 10

This is the final entry in my Robots of the 80s series so it’s fitting that these are probably the crowning pieces in my soon-to-be-dispersed collection. At the very least, my enduring favorites.

There was a trend in the Transformers toy line to have a team of several robots that combined to form a larger and more powerful robot. In retrospect, this was quite a brilliant marketing strategy. The first such group of robots were the Constructicons — 6 green construction vehicles that all transformed into robots and then combined into — I think — Destructor. Afterwards, there was a team of jet craft Autobots and automobile Decepticons (turning the usual Autobot/Decepticon forms on their ear) which refined the combination model so that it now involved a larger Transformer which formed the mega-robot’s torso and 4 smaller Transformers as the limbs.

My favorites were always the Technobots and the Terrorcons:

Click for larger image

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Robots Of The 80s, Part 9

Hang in there! Only one more part in the series after this one!

Now we come to the “Masters” series. I’m impressed that these Transformers remained in such good condition. That simply means that they were purchased when my interest in the toy line was waning but when I still wanted to collect a representative sample of each type of Transformer.

The Transformers toy line had Targetmasters, Headmasters, and Powermasters. The concept behind this was that the larger, more capable Transformers had little robot assistants who were humans who had undergone special operations to become special-purpose Transformers.

The first example of this is the Targetmaster. I think this one was named Slapdash. I have no idea what his gun was named.