[FFmpeg-devel] FFmpeg Meeting of March 13.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Hello folks,

Today, March 13, 2021, was held an FFmpeg developer meeting, to speak about our current developer situation.

The meeting started on IRC and on Jitsi, at 17:00 Berlin/Paris time.

There were from 10 to 16 people on the Jitsi call, and a few other that were only on IRC.


1. GA update

The General Assembly list of members was updated with the rules that were decided in the past. The extra members are kept.
The current GA is now 40 people in 2021.
A few people lost their vote rights (Dale, Diego, foobaz, Vittorio, some Google, and Akamai folks) and a few were added, notably from Intel.

No new extra member was nominated lately, nor doing the call.
You can nominate anyone at any time.

2. Voting system
The new voting system is finally in place and working
And the SchulzeSTV method now works.
Please note that some people don't receive the voting system emails, notably in China.

3. TC & TC rules
24 people out of 40 people from the GA voted for the new Technical Committee rules.
23 people were for, and 1 was against. The rules are now enforced.
TC is now fully functional. tc at ffmpeg.org alias is actually working.

4. GSoC
FFmpeg is part of GSoC 2021. Yay \o/

PLEASE please, PLEASE add more tasks, even without mentors:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/SponsoringPrograms/GSoC/2021

Note that GSoC this year is shorter than usual, so smaller tasks, including  improvements of current projects or current modules. Smallish improvement or cleanups of patches that were never merged can work as GSoC

Ideas discussed were:
Vapoursynth, curl Dash, Pipewire?, Wayland?, Better Windows capture? Fate-network.
Please add some of them.

5. Hardware
Who needs hardware?

We discussed about access to hardware for Fate and for HwAccel development.
Discussion around access to nVidia hardware was done.

In order to get more hardware, please ask on the mailing list like Kieran did the other day.
We have over 100k$ available at SPI, so please ask. The hardware is still owned by SPI, but it can be used unlimited in time.

Question was raised about FFmtech fate/bane -> JB to ask Ronald and Stefano what is the statut.

We then discussed about doing a Simple software to be developed for network testing of Fate. Maybe as a GSoC task?

6. Next major bump discussion

We discussed about the next major bump.
Tasks mentionned:
- james's AVPacket patch set
- being able to remove deprecated features
- mcdeint and uspp still utilize deprecated (?) APIs

It is important to explain WHY we need this bump, and the reasons, for our users.

7. CC/CoC
CoC -> JB, move your *ss

8. Next release
We spoke quickly about the next release. Nothing very specific, but it would be nice if james patchset could get in.

9. Release schedule
Discussion arrived about codifying the release schedule, notably which versions to maintain, when do we bump or not, when do we deprecate or not, and if we can do an LTS system.
This will be discussed on the mailing list later.

10. Migrate Trac to an up-to-date version -> let's talk to A Strasser to at least update to 1.4.x

11. We spoke about Gitlab-like migration. 
- Easier to list MRs VS mailing list threads
- Built-in CI which can be modified more easily than the current patchwork FATE running
nothing was decided, but the list of requirements for such a system should be discussed.

12. NDI/Vk and so on
We discussed about a policy for hardware criteria to allow or not those hardware and libraries.

13. Swscale. We talked about it, without any specific conclusion.
Same for I/O event-based loop.


I probably forgot things, but you should attend anyway :)

Best,

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf -  President
+33 672 704 734