[FFmpeg-devel] IRC ffmeeting on Saturday 15 June - 16 UTC

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Friday 2013-06-14 18:20:46 +0200, Stefano Sabatini encoded:
> On date Saturday 2013-06-08 02:33:24 +0200, Clément Bœsch encoded:
> > On Sat, Jun 08, 2013 at 01:48:15AM +0200, Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > I propose to have an IRC meeting on the next Saturday, at 16 UTC.
> > > 
> > > Topics to discuss:
> > > - crowdfunding, donation system improvements, merchandising etc.
> > > - technical issues, TODOs, long term projects
> > > - miscellanea
> > > 
> 
> REMINDER: the meeting will be held tomorrow, join #ffmpeg-devel just
> before the appointed hour (16 UTC) and we'll tell where and how the
> meeting will be held.
> 
> > > Feel free to propose more topics.
> > > 
> > I guess you could add infrastructure; we have a few issues about that
> > AFAIK.
> 
> Sure, consider it part of the misc entry.

A short summary of the meeting in attachment.

DISCLAIMER: consider this summary like a personal elaboration of the
meeting log, it may miss important details or contain inaccurate
information, in that case feel free to point them out.

NOTE: the real names of some participants are not indicated either
because I don't know them, or because I've been asked not to show
them.
-------------- next part --------------
FFmpeg meeting of 2013-06-15
============================

The meeting is held in the #ffmpeg-meeting freenode IRC channel UTC on
15th June 2013, starting from 16 UTC.

The participation is open to all FFmpeg developers and contributors.

Order of the day:
1. crowdfunding, donation system improvements, merchandise etc.
2. technical issues, TODOs, long term projects
3. server infrastructure
4. miscellanea

The meeting is joined by the following contributors:
Andrei Utkin (kriegerod)
(durandal_1707)
(Compn)
Carl Eugen Hoyos (cehoyos)
Clement Boesch (ubitux)
Hendrik Leppkes (nevcariel)
Ivan Kalvachev (iive)
Jean First (cbsrobot)
Kieran Kunhya (kierank)
Lou Logan (llogan)
Lukasz Marek (lukaszmluki)
Michael Niedermayer (michaelni)
Stefano Sabatini (saste)
Timothy Gu (Timothy_Gu) - starting from 18:39
(wm4)

The meeting begins officially at 16:00 UTC, but actual discussion
starts around 16:15.

A short summary of the discussion follows.

1. crowdfunding, donation system improvements, merchandise

FFmpeg gathered ~1000$ since it started to collect donations through
SPI in June 2012, and about 400$ was spent to fund travel expenses
related to multimedia events.

Increasing the amount of collected donations would allow to cover more
travel expenses (for more events and more developers), and fund
developers hardware upgrade.

Proposals related to donations:
- enhance visibility for donations on the website, for example by
  adding a link to the download page or in general putting more
  donation links on the website
- provide better/simpler mechanism for donations, needs cooperation with SPI
- add support for paypal donations
- add support for flattr

A commercial paypal account may need accounting and tax filing.

Proposals related to sponsorships:
- add bounties to bugreports, http://www.freedomsponsors.org/ could
  be used for that
- add a logo of sponsoring companies to the ffmpeg web page (see
  linuxmint website for examples)
- support crowdfunding (e.g. through external services like
  kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.). Crowdfunding could be used to fund
  specific internal projects or generic "campaign", for example to
  fund a bugfixing campaign or Summer-Of-Code-like internal
  programs.

Proposals related to overall project promotion:
- create a more appealing/modern design for the website
- get a promotion/communication person to write some news, relay them to
  phoronix & perform other random promotional services
- provide a blog/planet or news aggregator for FFmpeg related posts
  (the g+ page could be used for that purpose)

Merchandise
- sell merchandise (mugs, stickers, T-shirts, etc.) showing the
  FFmpeg logo

As a general issue: it is observed that the actuation of many
proposals requires the presence of a formal entity representing the
project and owning the trademark and logos and identity elements
associated to the project. On the other hand the creation of such
legal entity would imply the need to deal with accounting / legal /
fiscal issues related to copyright and money handling.

* License violations

License violator prosecution is apparently still since a few
years. SPI/SFLC looks like the obvious choice for what regards legal
assistance in that area. The prosecution can be led by any copyright
holder.

The Hall Of Shame page was removed from the website at some point, it
was proposed to restore it and/or integrate/replace it with the ticket
manager (this would require less manual synching work). The Hall of
Shame would help to reduce violations because of the negative
publicity associated with it.

2. technical issues, TODOs, long term projects

The following issues are mentioned as being particularly popular:
- mpegts/H.264 muxing/timestamp issues
- playlist design issues and issues related to chained muxers option
  passing (e.g. HLS option passing)
- ffserver generic issues
- ffserver RTMP/HLS missing output support

Long/medium term projects proposed/requested:
- remaining mp filters port
- language binding creation (through SWIG or similar)
- high level API creation
- EDL support

FATE support extension is also discussed. FATE is still missing
clients for the following architecture targets: (native) arm64, alpha,
ia64, parisc, s390, sh4, sparc, and blackfin. There are also probably
missing OS targets (Windows variants?).

It is proposed to add a news entry on the website to ask companies to
setup FATE machines for the missing targets.

3. server infrastructure

* FFmpeg source code repository move from VideoLAN hosting

FFmpeg source code repository is currently hosted by VideoLAN. It was
proposed to move the repository from there, either to the FFmpeg
server or to an external resource such as github.

Such move will help to achieve more independence for the project. Also
there is the possibility that the strict connection between FFmpeg and
Videolan related to the hosting may affect VideoLAN negatively,
e.g. with reference to the past GSoC edition rejection which involved
both projects.

On the other hand it was observed that VideoLAN hosting seems more
reliable than the service offered by Github, and that moving the
repository to the project server would require the assistance of a
fourth administrator, which would join the team currently composed by
Michael Niedermayer, Arpad Gereoffy (A'rpi), and Reimar Doffinger.

There seems to be a consensus that while there is no explicit request
from the VideoLAN administrators, and we lack a volunteer to
administer the server, moving the code repository does not seem to
have high priority at the moment.

* Debian packaging status

Since the Libav fork there are no official packages for FFmpeg in
Debian (see http://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/1781).

There is no much hope that FFmpeg will be packaged by Debian, unless
an interested maintainer/packager volunteers for doing that.

Several developers had some contacts with interested Debian packagers,
but there is the need to recontact them. One technical issue to
address is to restore full API/ABI compatibility with Libav (see trac
ticket #2672).

4. Miscellanea

Various topics are discussed.

* FFmpeg stickers

Lou Logan ordered around 500 stickers with the FFmpeg logo which he
would like to distribute amongst developers, and he got confirmation
from the SPI treasurer that such expenses can be covered by SPI, as
long as the stickers are used to promote FFmpeg.

* FFmpeg twitter/G+ account

There is a twitter account (https://twitter.com/FFmpeg) which is now
controlled by Lou Logan. It is proposed to use the account to send
tweets when a news article is posted on the website News section (and
the same could be done with the G+ account).

There is another twitter account "ffmpegsvn" which is not active since
2010, but resurrecting it is not deemed really useful.

---

The meeting is declared closed at 19:20 UTC.