Evaluation of Google Summer of Code 2008 for VideoLAN

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:17:00 -0800

This is a post to summarize and evaluate the work that we did this year, compared to last year too.

This was our second year of the Google Summer of Code project.

Google Summer of Code 2008

For the second time, VideoLAN was an association mentor for the Google Summer of Code project.

The 2008 edition of GSoC had a few improvements and change in the way Google and we handled it. Let's detail ours:

VideoLAN, VLC && x264

This year, we decided that VideoLAN would be a mentoring association for BOTH VLC and x264, instead of doing the same confusion as usual between VLC and VideoLAN.

This meant that we had to work with the x264 team to find ideas, mentors and define common rules. This was an extra amount of time, but for a good reason!

VideoLAN rules

After the last year Google Summer of Code summit, we learned quite a few things, and I decided to be a bit more strict during the summer of code. This is Google money, what about using it correctly? Here we go for the major changes:

More publicity,
Qualification tasks. I cannot emphasize more on the goods this brought to us,
Better reviewing from developers, with common rules to follow on how to give points,
More involvements of students in the community (presentation mail on mailing list, mandatory public wiki page),
Mandatory commit and status mail every week to mentor+admin,
A more active special mailing list!

Results

Those changes were great...

Selection

We received many candidacies, with higher quality and we had the possibility to chose 14 students!

One of them stopped before even beginning, because he had found a new job. So we started with 13 students:

9 for VLC media player
4 for x264

Detailed results on VLC:

Just going to review every students and whether their code was merged or not.

Please keep in mind that coding on VLC is not as easy as it might seem. And the code is evolving quite fast, so sometimes, it is difficult to keep stuffs up-to-date.

Lukas Durfina

Lukas was my student and was working on the Fullscreen Controller and Phonon work. The Qt fullscreen controller was in VLC release 0.9.0 and the Phonon work is almost merged in 1.0.

Geoffroy Couprie

Geoffroy had the difficult task to rework on the WinCE/Windows Mobile port of VLC. Most of the work has been merged in the upcoming VLC 1.0.

Antoine Lejeune

Antoine was working on the Maemo port of VLC. The code has been merged in VLC 1.0.

Kaarlo Henrik Räihä

Kaarlo is a very very active member of our community and was working on very difficult aspects of Vista integration, namely DXVA. The project was very difficult and successful for the most part, but it isn't merged yet in VLC.

Fabio Ritrovato

Fabio was working on MTP device integration. The code is good and the project is successful and the merge is pending (hopefully for 1.0)

Mirsal Ennaime

Mirsal is a long time coder in the community and was rewritting the UPnp client and hopefully the server for DLNA. The project was also successful, but the merge is pending because of some services discovery changes in our code. It should happen for 1.0

Dylan Yudaken

Dylan was working on PVR improvements and on timeshifting. The project was also very successful and Dylan was a delight working with. Some things have been merged, some are going to.

Eric Dudiak

Eric reworked our very bad MacOS X interface This was very difficult but the outcome was quite good. The mergins is still pending too.

Vladimir Belousov

This project was a failure.

Google Summer of Code Summit

This summer of code summit was great, because it was 2 days and we had way more time to discuss with other people.

I, however, have found it not enough focused on the GSoC, but maybe this was because I didn't choose the right discussions.

Conclusion

This Google Summer of Code was a HUGE success for VideoLAN and we had some very very good output, some of which you already have on your Computer!

Thank you Leslie!

Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - summit