[FFmpeg-devel] New to the list

Jason Garrett-Glaser darkshikari
Sat Sep 20 04:19:31 CEST 2008


On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 7:11 PM, abshnasko <abshnasko at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I'm new to the list and I'd like to introduce myself. My name is
> Travis, and I'm a CS student at Virginia Tech. I'm looking to spend next
> semester doing independent study, and I'm wondering if anyone can give me
> some ideas on a semester-long project I could work on for ffmpeg. Since the
> next semester doesn't start until January, I'd like to find some smaller
> tasks to do in order to acquaint myself with the codebase. Any suggestions
> on where to start? Suggestions on a project I could work on ~10hrs per week
> for 4 months?
>
> Any input is appreciated.

There's an enormous number of useful tasks to go around depending on
what your interest is; I suspect someone will soon link the
appropriate pages on the ffmpeg wiki.

To name some things off the top of my head:

1.  There's a whole list of old Google Summer of Code projects that
were incomplete that could be completed--most involve implementing
some sort of encoder or decoder.  Some current ones in active
development (i.e. not stalled ones) are MLP encoding, ALAC encoding,
and MPEG-4 ALS encoding.

2.  H.264 decoding speed boosts are, or at least should be, one of the
main priorities of ffmpeg development.  x264 has an enormous amount of
assembly which could be ported to libavcodec for use in decoding.  In
particular, this includes intra prediction, inverse transform, and
SSE2 deblocking.

3.  Alexander Strange has been working on multithreaded decoding for
some video formats in ffmpeg.  One possibility would be to extend this
framework to encoding, or to other formats that aren't yet supported
(or to help him merge it to the main ffmpeg tree).

4.  Help reverse-engineering RV30 or RV40 (may be very difficult; the
project seems to have hit an impasse despite being almost done).

5.  Port any number of algorithmic encoding improvements pioneered by
x264 into libavcodec to improve the encoding of older formats.

Dark Shikari




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