Google has announced which students have earned slots for the 2008 Summer of Code. As with previous years, I don’t know whether to congratulate or console the constituents of this collection:

• Alexander Strange: Generic frame-level multithreading support for FFmpeg
• Bartlomiej Wolowiec: Nellymoser Encoder
• Jai Menon: ALAC Encoder
• Keiji Costantini: LGPL reimplementation of GPL sws_scale parts
• Kostya: AAC-LC Encoder
• Ramiro Polla: MLP/TrueHD encoder
• Sascha Sommer: WMA Pro Decoder
• Sisir Koppaka: VP3/Theora Encoder
• Zhentan Feng: MXF Muxer

Feast your eyes on those ambitious projects. It’s going to be quite a summer.

A hearty “thanks” and “good luck to you too” go out to the registered FFmpeg mentoring crew, including Andreas Setterlind, Andreas Öman, Aurélien Jacobs, Baptiste Coudurier, Benjamin Larsson, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Justin Ruggles, Kristian Jerpetjoen, Luca Barbato, Reimar Döffinger, and Robert Swain (2006 GSoC Alumnus). And as always, there’s the unofficial über-mentor, Michael Niedermayer, who also has the final say in whether a project’s code is ready for inclusion into the tree.

In the nick of time, Sisir Koppaka finished the BFI playback system and qualified for FFmpeg’s 2008 Summer of Code:

The format is used in a few multimedia-heavy games from Tsunami such as Flash Traffic: City of Angels, which is pictured above. Remember that FFmpeg does not stipulate that a supported format be at all useful, or that it come from a good game. As you can see from the sample above, not even the actors could maintain any enthusiasm through the production.

Just a reminder that the (revised) Summer of Code application submission deadline is tomorrow, Monday, April 7. If you are a student and want to be considered for an FFmpeg Summer of Code project slot, you need to enter an application (one or more) into Google’s system by the end of the day on Monday. That is not, however, the deadline for qualification tasks. That comes next week.

The qualification tasks required of students in order to participate in FFmpeg’s Summer of Code program has finally afforded me the opportunity to create a “Small FFmpeg Tasks” page on the MultimediaWiki. Of course, the small tasks list was originally chartered to qualify students, but it need not be limited to that purpose. As I wrote on the page, it can be used for anyone who needs a good starting point for FFmpeg hacking. Further, it could be used for someone who has been away from the codebase and needs an exercise to motivate re-familiarization.

I have this — perhaps unfounded — vision that there are many lurkers out there, watching the FFmpeg project from a distance, on or off the notoriously abrasive mailing lists, hoping one day to get involved somehow, but not knowing exactly how to break in. The small tasks list is a great place to start. Maybe you don’t feel all that comfortable with what you have seen during your lurkings, perhaps because you can’t figure out what is meant with this whole “top-posting” thing for which n00bs are routinely savaged. If that’s you, you can always email me privately about getting started. I will (probably, depending on the day) be happy to tutor you on the basics for contributing some code. Email address is on the side bar.