The 2008 Google Summer of Code participating organizations have been selected. Like last year, I wanted to survey what other multimedia-type projects are doing. Fortunately, instead of clicking on each individual project in the official Google listing to figure out which ones might be vaguely multimedia-related, the GenMAPP project (also a participating organization) has organized the various projects by category.
Multimedia category projects include BBC Research, FFmpeg, GStreamer, Neuros Technology, XBMC, and Xiph.org. Tangential to multimedia are the 2 TV & Video category projects, Dirac Schroedinger (separate from BBC) and VideoLan.
Check out XBMC’s SoC project page. If you have been active with FFmpeg’s own SoC page, it should seem charmingly familiar. Eh, it’s all GFDL, I guess.
Then there is the Audio & Music category: Atheme, Audacity, CLAM, Mixxx, and XMMS2. I hadn’t heard of Atheme before. I can’t quite nail down what it is they do, but they seem to have a number of ambitious software projects under their umbrella. And one of their proposed SoC endeavors is “Support for RealAudio: Implement an input plugin for the RealAudio codec, preferably with support for streaming as well as files.” Seems a bit understated.
These are some other projects that caught my eye at a cursory glance:
- Our VideoLAN brothers are also sponsoring projects for x264 improvements.
- Audacity proposes a project for better FFmpeg integration.
- Schroedinger proposes a project to implement Dirac in Java.
- Xiph proposes several projects that directly improve upon FFmpeg itself, including fixing my mistakes in the existing VP3/Theora decoder.
- The Gnash project is not directly involved but seems to be an adjunct of at least 3 projects that I have found: Neuros Technology, GNU, and OLPC.
Speaking of Neuros Technology, this is the first time I have heard of them. They produce an open platform as a digital media center. GSoC participants will receive one of the items. Tantalizing. No such perks for working on FFmpeg. But I would like to remind prospective GSoC participants that FFmpeg offers valuable real world experience in the form of working long, thankless hours for a set of abusive, anti-social, impossible-to-please bosses on a rarely acknowledged piece of backend software. This is training you don’t get in school.
The application process begins bright and early on Monday morning (March 24). And don’t forget your qualification task.
Wow, so many meaningless project names. Exactly how hard is it to provide a succinct and purposful description.
— bleh
Not really a multimedia project, but there is another project with an idea that interests multimedia applications on Linux: the Wine project.
Their WinePlugin idea is quite interesting to me, as it would allow to get rid of quite a lot of code from xine, and just use Wine itself to provide access to win32codecs. MPlayer, VLC and GStreamer could use that too.
While certainly depending on Wine wouldn’t be the nicest thing for most users, I’d rather get rid of maintaining that code in xine to use WinePlugin directly. I hope at least!
Atheme is a umbrella for various free software projects, one of them being Audacious media player, the semi-direct descendant of XMMS1.
I’m involved with Atheme, though not (officially) with our GSoC effort, and had already criticized the vagueness and almost outright impossibility of the RealAudio plugin idea .. I think we’re going to scrap that, or possibly change it into “implement RealAudio input plugin via FFmpeg’s libav* libraries.”