Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

The company which tries so hard not to be evil, has this year again payed students, 900 according to wikipedia to work on free software. 8 of them worked on ffmpeg this year, luckily the results are less disasterous than last year where half the 5 students which where supposed to work on ffmpeg plain dissapeared, and just reapeared before the deadline to convince us that they where almost finished with everything so as to get payed …

But lets rather talk about this years SOC, first there where 19 students, submitting 37 applications about ffmpeg. To rate these 37 applications and to prevent the high failure rate of last year, we required students to do a qualification task, that is they had to make a not too insignificant contribution to ffmpeg to be accepted. What exactly they did was pretty much their decission though there was a list of suggestions. As a beautifull sideeffect of that, the qualification tasks led to some nice and new features for ffmpeg :).

9 of the 19 students submitted a qualification task, all thouse who submitted one passed, in addition 1 student was qualified through extensive past work on ffmpeg. From these 10 students, 2 sadly couldnt be accepted as they wanted to work on the same task as other students, well in principle it would have been possible to let 2 students work on the same task but it seemed silly. 1 wasnt accepted as his project appeared rather uninterresting and somewhat unrelated to video/audio. The 8th slot google provided was thus given to a student who didnt submit a qualification task. Also the actual decission of who would be accepted and who not was that of the mentors rating applications not of any single person …

So whats the current status?

• Davids matroska muxer has passed review and should be commited to ffmpeg svn soon
• Kostyas RV40 decoder looks pretty good and could probably be commited to ffmpeg svn soon, well actually if kosyta wanted he could commit immedeatly and continue work in ffmpeg svn
• Marcos dirac decoder is also in good shape and theres not much keeping it from being commited, the encoder though needs more work
• Kamils jpeg 2000 encoder and decoder, arent in good shape yet (only 2 out of 50 encoded images can be decoded by jasper, only 2 of 23 reference jpeg2k files can be decoded by kamils decoder), but then please dont forget that writing an encoder and decoder at the same time is harder then just one of the 2
• Reynaldos QCELP decoder is missing a working postfilter, 1/4 and 1/8 decoding, so it needs more work as well
• Bobbys avfilter is in quite good shape though its missing well working colorspace negotiation, also its missing actual integration in ffmpeg.c, only ffplay.c is there
• Bartlomiejs EAC-3 decoder hasnt been reviewed by me yet …
• xiaohuis mpeg-ts muxer itself also hasnt been reviewed by me yet, his patches though which where submitted and which ive reviewed need more work

I hope of course that all 8 students continue to work on their projects, free software in general and ffmpeg specifically!