Category Archives: Open Source Multimedia

News regarding open source multimedia projects.

SNOW Bounty

People have often batted around the idea of offering bounties for FFmpeg work — a preset sum of money for a discrete set of goals. Lars Täuber is making a public offer for someone to complete a specific set of goals in order to bring FFmpeg’s SNOW codec up to 1.0 viability.


Wanted: SNOW
Thanks to Glass Giant’s Wanted Poster Generator

We have never done anything quite like this so this should be a learning experience for all of us. For starters, the person aiming for the 1200 Euros ought to be qualified for the task. Ideally, the individual should — at a minimum — perform a qualification task, similar to what we enforced with the Google Summer of Code this year.

Maybe we will eventually have a proper non-profit organization established in order to administer such bounty programs as well as escrow donations. In the beginning, though, if you are interested, check in on the ffmpeg-devel list and we’ll talk.

Gone Fishin’

Vacation approaches. I’m heading out to Berlin.de soon for LinuxTag 2007. If you happen to be at the conference, do stop by the free multimedia booth to meet the crew. Oh, and be sure to attend my presentation, “FFmpeg: Past, Present, and Future”, which will be a fairly high-level overview of FFmpeg, its surrounding culture, the challenges it has overcome, and the challenges it still faces.

Answer to FAQ: Maybe the presentation will be recorded and placed online; that’s really not my department. Enough people seem to be interested that this will probably happen one way or another.

Samples Needed: E-AC3

One of FFmpeg’s Summer of Code projects is a decoder implementation for E-AC3. Thus far, the only samples available are rips from HD-DVDs. However, according to the E-AC3 mentor/student pair, these streams are not especially interesting for building a full-featured decoder; they don’t really flex the new features presented in the E-AC3 (a.k.a. a/52b) coding standard.

Thus, I’m wondering if anyone out there has the capability to encode new samples, preferably ones that make sure of the new bells and whistles? Or if anyone even knows what software can do this, that would be useful knowledge as well.

It would be particularly arduous to have to first write our own encoder so that we could also write the decoder.

VQ/RoQ Coding Exercise

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.