[FFmpeg-devel] GSoC 2009: FFmpeg is in

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 04:26:52PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:12:18PM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 08:11:07PM -0700, Mike Melanson wrote:
> > > 
> > > I would like to point out that we don't have a whole lot of mentors or 
> > > projects signed up right now. If you have a good idea for a project, 
> > > please make it known on the wiki. If you are willing to mentor for it, 
> > > even better.
> > 
> > During the 3 years that we have participated in SoC, 21 projects were
> > worked on by students, but only 6 were finished in time:
> > 
> >  VC-1 Decoder        (Kostya)
> >  RealVideo 4 Decoder (Kostya)
> >  Matroska Muxer      (David Conrad)
> >  Nellymoser Encoder  (Bartolomiej Wolowiec)
> >  ALAC Encoder        (Jai Menon)
> >  MXF Muxer           (Zhentan Feng)
> > 
> > Kostya was already an experienced dev with plenty of implemented codecs
> > under his belt when he worked on SoC and even there it is debatable if
> > the RV40 decoder was really finished.  Bartolomiej had participated in
> > SoC the year before and not finished E-AC-3 then.
> > 
> > So in conclusion we can say that our SoC projects are too hard.
> 
> I dont think this conclusion can be drawn with certainity, there are
> at least a few things in this conclusion that you implicate that i think
> should be listed explicitly
> i mean, it seems rather
> 1. We want more people to finish
> 2. Projects failed because tasks are too hard
> 
> I think both of these need to be considered more carefully, the evil truth is
> we (or at least I) dont care at all how many students finish their project,
> what i care about is to maximize the usefull work that is done and here a
> unfinished project that can be picked up and finished is
> pretty good as well, this should be considered in the listing ...

This is what I care about as well.

> Also, what i would consider VERY important is that instead of doing
> arm chair economy estimations we should look look at other FOSS
> software that was taking part of SOC and who had simpler projects at
> average this should give a clearer view ...

armchair philosophy :)

> > Especially when the task is implementing decoders, apparently.
> > 
> > Qualification tasks did improve the situation somewhat.  The students
> > that did them performed better than those during the first year.
> > Nonetheless most of them did not reach the end goal, i.e. seeing their
> > code in SVN.
> > 
> > Something needs to change.
> 
> Iam not so sure about this, the biggest problem IMHO was that students where
> not nearly as qualified, experienced and willing to work as i would have liked
> to see, and if iam anywhere close to the truth with this, no change of the
> kind of projects will really solve it.
> It surely might create the illusion of improvment by simply giving people
> tivial tasks but thats not neccessarily improving the overall advancement for
> ffmpeg

I don't want to see people doing trivial tasks.  But I think downsizing
tasks a bit will advance FFmpeg more.  I especially think that unfinished
tasks from previous years should be eligible to be continued and
(hopefully) completed.  I think this would advance FFmpeg more than
anything else.  Whether some tasks are simpler than others is secondary.

> >  I suggest making unfinished projects from
> > past SoC events eligible projects this year.
> 
> This may be a good idea.

Excellent, everybody seems to like my suggestion.

Diego