Once upon a time, a talented developer named Eric Lasota wrote a RoQ encoder named SwitchBlade. He also made a patch to hook it up to FFmpeg. Your job, if you are searching for an entry level task for jumping into FFmpeg development, is to revise that patch for inclusion into the main FFmpeg source tree. All the code is there. I think that the main chores involved will be reformatting the code to use the same style as FFmpeg, and concatenating the source files in a sane manner. You may need to revise some of the code per the guru’s specifications. Email me (email address under links on side bar) for more advice if you would like to take on this task.
Check his projects page to find the project source.
If you have more such suggestions for tasks of any size for FFmpeg, it would be good to make a list of them somewhere and I’m quite interested in having an FFmpeg wiki for user documentation (which could maybe be exported to some downloadable format) and for developer idea management (read ‘a public TODO list’) alongside the codec details on http://wiki.multimedia.cx/ . Does such a page already exist?
Not yet, but Ben and I were discussing that yesterday. It would be a good idea to create a new Wiki page with links to these “task posts” that the guru and I are starting to write.