3 days left to prepare your summer

Hi folks,

The Google Summer of Code deadline for student application is nearing and thought it would be good to highlight some projects that are dear to me:

• PiTiVi : The inclusion of PiTiVi in Ubuntu Lucid has brought about a lot more interest, and while the reception is overall positive for what it can do right now, we know there’s still a lot more work to make it the swiss-army-penknife of editing. A student has already proposed adding the support for effects, but other items that would be great to have are:
  • Collaborative editing : Allowing several people across a network/internet to work on a common project, using the telepathy project.
  • Improving the Media Asset Management support of PiTiVi (i.e. solving the problem of having hours and hours of footage, how to search/sort/tag them efficiently). Leveraging existing technologies instead of reinventing the wheel is a must here
  • Auto-cleanup of editing: Average consumers don’t know how to shoot, the camera moves, there’s some hissing in the audio, the color-balance is always changing,  …  This would be an excellent project for somebody with lots of video editing experience who has got an eye to making an editing project look professional (i.e. anti-youtube) and wants to help automatize all the tedious little tasks one has to take care of. The goal would be to come up with a system to cleanup footage on import, help define proper transitions,.. This would go hand in hand with effects support.
• Wine DirectShow GStreamer backend. I mentored Trevor Davenport last year who proved that using GStreamer as a back-end for DirectShow on Wine is possible, but quite a bit of work is required to finish up this task to have it merged in wine trunk.
• GStreamer: Supporting VA-API in GStreamer would be a must, especially considering the awesome work Gwenole Beauchesne has done to make it support VDPAU as a backend. VLC has already switched to supporting only VAAPI for hardware-accelerated and it’s time GStreamer catches it up 🙂

The PiTiVi proposals can be proposed both in the GStreamer and GNOME organization, the Wine/DirectShow project with the Wine organization and the GStreamer projects… with GStreamer.

You can also hop into the IRC channels of the various projects to discuss your proposals. On the freenode network: #gstreamer, #pitivi, #winehq

The best proposals are always the ones where students have got an itch they want to scratch as opposed to being told what to do, so if you’ve got something in particular you’d like to hack on in the projects above, don’t hesitate to contact the maintainers/developers of those projects and propose your ideas… but hurry up… tic tic tic