Check out snakebite. Some folks associated with the Python programming language put together a farm of computers that all Python committers have access to so that they can code and test. They put together an impressive network, though the PowerPC architecture is suspiciously unrepresented in any incarnation that I can find. They received some notable corporate sponsorship too, according to the announcement email on python-committers.

Wouldn’t it be neat to set up something like this for FFmpeg folks? Actually, I tend to think our first and foremost concern would be to get a community-accessible PowerPC machine for debugging various woes on that platform. My PowerPC-based Mac Mini is overcommitted as it is. I happen to be personally familiar with at least one large corporation that has an unbelievable pile of PowerPC-based Macs in its basement (along with loads of other computers), waiting to recycled one day. Regrettably, they have no policy for repurposing the computers for non-corporate functions.

And I don’t want to hear anything about how hard it would be to debug problems in a multimedia program on a remote computer halfway around the world while only interacting via terminal. I did a significant amount of debugging and performance profiling of FFmpeg’s VP3 decoder once upon a time under those very circumstances. My trick, when I had to view the results of a decode operation, were to write the video frames to individual JPEG files. Then, I would run webfs to serve those JPEGs via HTTP to the localhost IP address and tunnel it back to my own machine via SSH to view in a local web browser.