Note: Application deadline is October 17. Internship dates will be December 6, 2016 to March 6, 2017.
Introduction
FFmpeg is the universal multimedia toolkit: a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert, filter and stream audio and video. It is used by a number of media players (including VLC, MPlayer, and Totem through GStreamer), video distribution websites (including YouTube and Vimeo), Internet browsers (including Google Chrome/Chromium), and lots of other software projects.
Outreachy is a program that helps underrepresented people to get involved in free and open source software. Through the guidance of mentors, interns gain valuable experience interacting with and coding for open source projects like FFmpeg. Additionally, the project and its users benefit from code created from applicants who often continue contributing as developers.
This is our landing page for the current round of the program, which will run from December 6, 2016 to March 6, 2016.
Information for Applicants
Getting Started
- Get to know FFmpeg. If you are an applicant interested in contributing to FFmpeg, it is recommended to start by subscribing to the ffmpeg-devel mailing-list, visiting our FreeNode IRC channels (#ffmpeg-devel and #ffmpeg although you will find most developers on the first one), and exploring both the codebase and the development workflow. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
- Find a project. Listed on this page are mentored and un-mentored projects. Mentored projects are well-defined and mentor(s) have already volunteered. Un-mentored projects are additional ideas you may want to consider, but you will have to contact us to find a mentor. You can also propose your own project, if you can think of one that better fits your interest and skill level. If a project description is unclear or you have any questions, please get in touch with its mentor and/or send an email to the program admins at [opw@ffmpeg.org].
- Contact us. If you decide on a project, get in touch with the community and let us know. If you want to work on a qualification task, let the respective mentor know so we can avoid duplicated efforts.
- Apply. Interns should apply by November 2 at the very latest. The "work" period begins December 7 and ends March 7. Take a look at Outreachy: Application Process for additional information.
Note: A friendly reminder that while the application to Outreachy is and important (and mandatory) part of this process, FFmpeg mentors will not base their decision solely on the Outreachy application. We will judge your application based on your abilities, learning capacity, communication skills etc. So please do not exclusively worry about your formal application being perfect but make an effort to complete a great qualification tasks too.
Qualification Tasks
In order to get accepted you normally have to complete a small qualification task. FFmpeg development can be quite challenging and the qualification task helps us figure out whether you are motivated enough and have the potential to deliver successfully.
The qualification tasks are usually shown in the project description. Contact the respective mentor(s) for assistance on getting a related qualification task or if you want to propose your own. You can also browse the FFmpeg Bug Tracker for qualification task ideas. In general qualification tasks should include submitting a patch to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list which passes review and is accepted into the FFmpeg codebase. It will be common for such patches to need multiple iterations of submissions and reviews, so dont wait too long with the first submission!
Note: Assigned qualification tasks are being tracked here.
Contacting FFmpeg
If you have questions or comments feel free to contact us via our mailing list, IRC channel, or e-mail one of the FFmpeg Outreachy admins:
- Mailing-list: ffmpeg-devel
- IRC: #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode
- FFmpeg Outreachy Admin: Paul B Mahol (durandal_1707 in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, onemda AT gmail DOT com), Michael Niedermayer (michaelni in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, michael@niedermayer.cc), Reynaldo Verdejo (reynaldo in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, R Verdejo on g mail)
- FFmpeg Outreachy Backup Admins:
You may also contact a mentor directly if you have questions specifically related to one of the projects listed on this page.
Mentored Projects
This section lists well-defined projects that have one or more available mentors. If you are new to FFmpeg, and have relatively little experience with multimedia, you should favor a mentored project rather than propose your own. Contact the respective mentor(s) to get more information about the project and the requested qualification task.
XPM decoder/encoder
Description: FFmpeg is currently missing XPM encoder and decoder, your task is to write one of them or both.
Mentor Paul B Mahol (durandal_1707 in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, onemda AT gmail DOT com)
CoreAudio AVFilter
Description: To write an avfilter to hook up the CoreAudio Filter API to FFmpeg. Should be written to support runtime loading of the CoreAudio filters (e.g. no hardcoding of the CoreAudio filters IDs/names). #5366 is the relevant ticket.
Mentor Josh de Kock (Freenode IRC: Chloe in #ffmpeg-devel, and email: josh AT itanimul DOT li)
Improve Selftest coverage
Description: FFmpeg contains many self-tests, still more code is not tested than tested thus more such tests are needed
to ensure regressions and platform specific bugs are quickly detected. Examples of existing self tests can be seen in */tests/*
Expected results: Significantly improve selftest code coverage
Prerequisites: Good C coding skills, basic familiarity with git
Qualification Task: Improve selftest code coverage by at least 1% of two of the main libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice, libavfilter, libavutil, libswresample, libswscale) as listed at coverage.ffmpeg.org.
Mentor: Michael Niedermayer (michaelni in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, michaelni@gmx.at)
Audio Fingerprinting Filters for FFmpeg
Description: Implementing filters for ffmpeg that would give different audio fingerprints for an audio which could be reused by other people for variety of applications. Goal of this system is given a song as an input, it would spits out similar sounding songs. Some of its applications are:
- detecting duplicate songs
- retrieving similar songs
- can be used for recommending songs
- clustering songs based on content/tags
- identifying a fragment of a recording
Expected results: A filter that can reliably and quickly identify a degraded song in a set of a million, better a billion songs
Prerequisites: Good C coding skills, basic familiarity with git, knowledge about audio fingerprinting
Qualification Task: Write a filter which finds and prints the frequency/time peaks, show that re-encoding the file at lower bitrate results in sufficiently identical peaks. Alternative Qualification Task: Write an implementation in libavutil which can lookup slightly degraded fingerprints quickly in a large set (millions better billions) of fingerprints on disk.
Mentor: Michael Niedermayer (michaelni in #ffmpeg-devel on Freenode IRC, michaelni@gmx.at)
