So Google has made public the projects that will go forward in the Google Summer of Code this year. In the GStreamer community we are very happy with the five proposals we ended up being able to greenlight in the end.

So this year we will aim at getting a MPEG PS muxer and improve our MPEG TS muxer, we also have a project to create an ASF muxer and ASF payloader plugin. With these in place we will pretty much have muxers for all the important formats out there available GStreamer.

We are also aiming at pulling more plugins into the GStreamer sphere with the addition of wrapper plugins for LADSPA version 2 plugins and Avisynth filters.

And last, but not least we got a project to do MHEG support in GStreamer. So people here in Britain for instance will be able to use a GStreamer based DVB application and be able to ‘press the red button’ to access the interactive features of DVB.

A big thanks to everyone who applied to this years summer of code, and I sincerely wish we could have greenlighted more of the applications. For those who did not get accepted feel free to grab me on IRC (uraeus) or send me an email and I will try to provide you with some more details if you are interested on why we didn’t choose your specific application to go forward. In general we looked at factors such as viability (how likely we thought it would be the proposal was successfully completed), importance to GStreamer (whether the project would help bring even more developers and users to GStreamer) and sustainability (we considered to what degree the projects would continue to be valuable after the SoC was over, even if the student decided to disappear into the void). The last point actually was one of the biggest proposal killers as we ditched a lot of projects based on the fact that without continued heavy maintenance after the SoC they would bit rot really fast.