[FFmpeg-devel] GSoC 2018 mentor summit review

[Thilo Borgmann]

Hi folks,

last weekend we attended the annual GSoC mentor summit. This time, it was Pedro Arthur and myself going there. As usual, there have been a huge amount of interesting fellow open-source projects around and we've met a lot of interesting people.

There have been a lot of interesting sessions like last year. Of course, many topics have been quite similar and development/progress in some areas are not too fast. The usual suspects have been in the general audio/video/multimedia session (VideoLAN, Kodi, Mixxx, MuseScore, Apertus, and others). Apart from the usual chat, we ha a general discussion about multimedia apps in the future - in general about moving away from a bare desktop application to a more web and/or service based application. More of interest for the front-end applications than for us being a library, of course.

There has been a session about OSS licences again, I can't remember a severe change of information given compared to last year, so [1] should still be an excellent resource of more information.

The team from ScummVM is interested in improving one of the gaming codecs and maybe someone will be into this fun :) They should provide us some samples containing yet ignored side-data, used for sprite-like animation of decoded sprite content onto the output image/canvas (if I understood correctly, what they were explaining).

We also have an open offer for cooperation/support by Red Hen Lab [2]. They are recording and transcoding a massiva amount of TV broadcastsa around the world including more rare formats like DTMB (chineese TV) and ISDB (JP and southern american TV). They would be able to provide us with any samples we might find interesting. If anyone is interested, send me a mail.

There has been an announcement about an upcoming new Google program from Google's OSPO. There will be a "Season of Docs", aiming to reach out for technical writers to enhance documentation of open source programs. In contrast to GSoC, this shall not be a sponsored work but pro bono. More details yet to be disclosed!

Finally, a community driven overview of the sessions given and notes taken per session can be found here [3], for anyone interested in specifics of that or the corresponding notes.

It was my pleasure to come to know Pedro in person - maybe he has some more comments about the summit and hin impressions.

Cheers,
Thilo

[1] https://opensource.org/licenses/

[2] http://www.redhenlab.org/

[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nNSud67RB_39HERpPdn-r6U3ANiC31VWHiFkKAoENBI/edit?ts=5bc91932#heading=h.lbox8n3en4ka