Archive:Google Summer of Code/2008

Template:Current event Google is sponsoring their forth annual Summer of Code (SoC) in the summer of 2008. The XBMC Project has not yet been selected as one of the approved mentoring organizations howeever we do plan to apply this year. This page will entail sponsoring students to work on assorted open source projects as well as sponsoring mentors in those same projects. Everyone wins.

How to apply

Before you can apply

Before you can apply make sure you are qualified enough to apply:

• You have to know how to program in C and C++ fairly well.
• We would like you to first submit a patch that fixes a bug or adds a feature to XBMC. By doing that we will know that you are qualified for the task or not. On this page there is a list of Qualification Tasks that can be done. But you are free to submit anything you feel might be of value to FFmpeg. The qualification task can be done after you have filed you application.
• Submit a good application through the formal Google Summer of Code process during the application timeframe.
• You have to have >35 hours per week to put into the project.
• You ca not have another job at the same time as the SoC project.

Applying

If you are interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code you will need to register at the official SoC site linked above and file an official application. Traditionally, top applications are fairly detailed. Look at this application herefor inspiration. The Drupal project has also prepared a couple of good guidelines:

• http://drupal.org/node/59037
• http://drupal.org/node/59963

Development

Each accepted project is developed in its own sandbox (SVN branch), separate from the main FFmpeg codebase. Naturally, the end goal of each of the accepted XBMC projects ought to be to have that code in shape for acceptance into the production codebase. This page will track the status of each project and how well each student are doing.

Current Status

• To Come.

Project Proposals

• To Come.

Overview

Qualifications for a good Summer of Code proposal:

• Discrete, well-defined, modular
• Comprised of a series of measurable sub-goals
• Based on open specs that are available free of charge
• Based on complete specs

An example of a good proposal is the implementation of a new feature or function that is not yet available in XBMC.

An example of a less desirable proposal is one that's not as measurable, such as refactoring an existing API. Bad proposals tend to be ones that would require touching a lot of core code.

To re-iterate:

• Localized/isolated code projects = good
• Global code refactoring = bad

Note

THIS LIST IS NOT THE FINAL PROPOSALS WE ARE SUBMITTING! Most of this list is just some project ideas we are kicking around, (which, by no means, limits any prospective proposals).

• Port XBMC for Mac OS X to compile and run on PowerPC (PPC) architecture.
• Add full VCD/SVCD menu support to XBMC (maybe via xine-vcdnav from Xine)
• Add native support for text-display from CDG Karaoke Audio-CDs (maybe via libcdio)

Projects with Mentors (official projects)

• To come.

Qualification tasks

Please add a note if you choose to work on a Qualification task to avoid duplicate work.

• Patches to make XBMC for Linux compile on 64-bit x86 architecture.
• Patches to make XBMC for Mac OS X compile on 64-bit x86 architecture.