VideoLAN - Yet another blog for JBKempf

Maybe no one cares, but still here are some random thoughts about what happened so far for us. I write them now, because I might forget those when all will be over.

Introduction

This is the second year for VideoLAN as a mentoring organisation for the GSoC.

In our first year we didn't outperform for many reasons (see here for details

VideoLAN is not a very stuctured organisation.

Candidacies

But this year, we received 85 candidacies (+8 ineligible) against something between 40 and 50 last year... (I fear that I don't have the exact number )

I know the GSoC is getting bigger every year, but still this is a big increase for us. Moreover, some of the students did some really good patches (one almost solved the main subject of one of our idea ) and the application level is better...

Why ?

So I don't really know exactly why, but here are a few guesses:

Last year, GSoC was a bit of a surprise for us. This year, we know way better what we can expect from students/mentors.
Last year, VideoLAN was mentoring only for VLC media player, this year, we have VLC media player and x264 (we have roughly 70/15 applications for VLC/x264)
Ideas were done mostly the same way, but we put more of them on our wiki this year. Ideas are more sized for a summer (see first reason)
We added ideas cross projects (x264-VLC, VLC-other codecs libraries, VLC-FreePV)
We added qualification tasks (VLC: compile VLC, provide a patch on the trunk, x264: more complex qualification tasks). This highered the quality.
We have tried to work with other projects (some FFmpeg mentors can read our applications (and vice-versa), we accepted FFmpeg and x264 qualification tasks as an "ok" for us, ...)
We announced everything earlier and were more organised between mentors (ml, IRC, meetings...)
We have a former student who is a mentor now.
I have more time than last year during that phase... :D Must be because the sun is better in California than in France...

Many ideas were recommendations that came from the Mentor Summit, so I must say that this summit did help us a *LOT*.

Hope this can help some people...

one comment

Friday, March 28 2008

Build VLC media player under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)

By JBK on Friday, March 28 2008, 12:49 - VideoLAN

I found an ubuntu hardy installation, and needed to test something on the trunk of VLC so I needed to compile a VLC for it. Here is a complete HOWTO to do the same !

25 comments

Monday, March 17 2008

Google Summer of Code: VideoLAN

By JBK on Monday, March 17 2008, 18:10 - VideoLAN

GSoC

Hello to everyone,

I am glad to announce you that VideoLAN is a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of code 2008.

Students, ideas

If you are an interested student, please check the ideas for VLC and x264 on our wiki.

Original ideas are more than welcome.

Timeline

Please check the SoC timeline. http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/

Rules

Unfortunately, we have to unforce a few rules to avoid failures and not-serious enough students: Rules.

Those rules are flexible, especially for x264.

Contact Us

If you are interested in anything around SoC, please contact xtophe (vlc), Dark_Shikari (x264) and me (vlc and other weird requests)

Everything is quite flexible, but I would like to focus on quality more than quantity.

May the code be with you.

one comment

Tuesday, March 11 2008

H264 encoding: "some boring x264 stuff that you’d better not forget.

By JBK on Tuesday, March 11 2008, 15:29 - VideoLAN

Copy from IRC and thresh's blog

From Dark_Shikari.

Absolutely 100% generic commandline for maximum quality without stupidly insanely slow options:
 –bime –bframes 16 –trellis 1 –mixed-refs –8×8dct –subme 7 –b-rdo –me umh –direct auto –b-pyramid –weightb –threads auto –ref 8
For extra slow, add –no-fast-pskip, –merange 32, and –partitions all
for more slow, raise –ref to 16, and –me to esa
and also, get the latest AQ build and use my AQ at strength 0.7-1.0 or something.
if you want faster encoding
1) Lower –ref to 4
2) lower subme to 6, remove –b-rdo
3) remove me umh
if you want realtime encoding you’ll have to go lower on most machines

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jb, 24y

Keyword - VideoLAN

OSCON 2008 registration confirmation

VideoLAN Webbys 5s in London.

Webbys 5s .org

Contents

Photos

Presentation

Vidéo

Reflexions about the first part of this SoC