It turns out that FFmpeg has been accepted as one of Google’s Summer Of Code mentoring organizations. Here is FFmpeg’s page at the SoC site. The team is assembling possible project ideas over at the MultimediaWiki. This could be your one chance to actually make money in directly helping the open source community.

I have a plan, I really do. I am still working hard on Understanding VC-1. Just so that you, the reader and open source multimedia enthusiast understand correctly, this is not so that we can build a new implementation that mirrors the reference implementation 1:1. What I am doing right now is more or less the “phase 1” of this particular documentation effort. Phase 2 is developing a more top-down specification in a similar spirit as my old VP3 format document. Phase 3 is to generate a development roadmap with specific tasks and milestones as well as a number of sample vectors for individual modules which should facilitate initial component validation as well as ease development of SIMD-optimized components.

So you see, phase 1 is where I essentially use the MultimediaWiki as a scratchpad. VC-1 is, like, really big and hard to get one’s head around. This process is helping me.

Part of my plan in all of this is that I am hoping to pawn off the actual writing of code on other people. I know there are people out there — even people reading this blog — who are interested in making some material contribution to open source multimedia. On Monday I learned of Google’s second annual Summer of Code initiative where, in a nutshell, college students can get paid to work on approved open source projects. Since the project as outlined above, with the roadmap and deliverables/milestones, seems ideal for this mentoring concept, I submitted FFmpeg as a project for consideration, albeit a few hours after the formal deadline for doing so. Since the SoC is quite popular, it’s likely that they have all the projects they need.

However, if a student is out there following this blog and interested in working on a very important piece of open source multimedia work, you will have the opportunity starting May 1 to submit an application to work on a project not listed with an official mentoring organization, per this SoC FAQ entry. It’s a long shot, but Google has sponsored more ambitious stuff.

A big task? You bet. But if you follow this blog you’re probably at least minimally qualified to tackle the project.

I was searching for some comprehensive registry of FourCCs when I happened upon Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections. They host an interesting, and recently updated, survey of all manner of multimedia formats including containers, video codecs, audio codecs, and text formats.

Also, I eventually found the Microsoft’s official list of registered AVI video FourCCs (and 16-bit audio codec identifiers): The IANA hosts it: http://www.iana.org/assignments/wave-avi-codec-registry. There is some very interesting stuff in there. Did you know that Dolby had an AC2 codec? And that their listed address is spelled incorrectly? (I know since their office is about 2 blocks away from where I work.)