Archive:Google Summer of Code/2018

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Home icon grey.png   ▶ Google Summer of Code ▶ 2018
GSOC 2016 logo.png

Welcome to the Kodi Google Summer of Code ideas page.

We encourage interested students to review some of the ideas on this page, and then feel free to provide input on any ideas you may have in the Kodi GSoC forum and chat about any project you’d love to cover. To propose a project, see #Students project proposal ideas.

From the 12th to the 27th of March, any interested students may apply at the GSOC home page to work with Kodi. After that, Google will notify applicants whether we get to work with each other according to the GSOC schedule.

About Us

As there may be many students who have landed here as a result of GSOC, but are unfamiliar with the project, here are a few resources that may help explain what we are about.

Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media, designed around the 10-foot interface (living room) environment. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, Kodi is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 500 software developers have contributed to Kodi, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 60 languages. For more information, see the page Kodi.


To get an idea of what Kodi is truly capable of, it really must be seen. Check out a few other user-created videos:
Kodi with the default Confluence skin
Kodi with Aeon Nox skin
Kodi on Raspberry Pi
Kodi's new PVR functionality

Kodi is written primarily in c++ and runs on a variety of platforms including Android, iOS, Linux, OS X, and Windows. It has been ported to work on several low-power platforms including the Raspberry Pi and Android.

Kodi was a mentoring organization in 2008, 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2017, and had team members involved in GSoC for other projects during 2011.

If Kodi is selected as a mentoring organization for 2018, students will need to review the Overview of a good project proposal, follow the outline for proposals when applying, and review the list of project ideas detailed below. Students are welcome to propose ideas outside the list and are encouraged to be as creative as they like.

Mentors

All mentors and backup mentors are extremely experienced in the Kodi codebase and will thus be able to assist students in getting to know the codebase and in quickly identifying projects that are both achievable for someone unfamiliar with the internal workings of Kodi and desirable to the wider Kodi community.

Prerequisites

C++ coding skills, basic familiarity with Git, solid understanding and interest in programming. Ability to quickly understand existing code is beneficial.

Project Proposals

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 Kodi.

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
  • A project should have a set of subgoals, so even if the end goal turns out to be too big some of the parts will be of benefit.
  • Not too big! This is an important problem when choosing a project, while it is fun to think about solving a grand project its not always realistic. Its better to finish a smaller project than to start a grand one.

Where to submit proposals

In addition to submitting to the Google Summer of Code website, you are highly encouraged to submit your idea/proposal to the Kodi forum for discussion. Any proposal not submitted to the forum for discussion will likely not be considered.

Outline for proposals

Team-Kodi proposal ideas up for discussion

Intro/outro Detection

Description: It would be nice to detect intros and outros of a file dynamically. Then make the intros and outros skipable. One way to do this would be to create a machine learning model per show and distribute those via an api. The scope of this project would focus on some examples and making it easy to add more later. Then implement an addon or core addition that takes those models and acts on them when playing a file, ultimatly making it possible to skip forward.

Expected outcome: Being able to skip past intros or outros of shows and maybe even movies.

Skills preferred: Python, C++, something to run an api - GO or Elixir would be prefered

Possible mentors: Razze

Difficulty: Hard

Type: Risky/Exploratory

UPnP Improvements including File Transfers

  • Support downloading of of media items (the actual file not just the metadata) from another Kodi instance (e.g. through UPnP) into the local library. This could be done in a "send to" way and in a "download" way and it could also be combined with transcoding depending on the target device.
  • UPnP device profiles. there's already a PR that goes in that direction and the problem is that right now we can only really provide device specific MIME type hacks but if we have transcoding we'll definitely need this

Better Profile Support

Description: Profile support inside Kodi remains extremely hacked together. Improving profile projects would likely be broken down into smaller chunks to make each chunk truly achieveable in a summer. Database handling for profiles needs to be reviewed and changed so that the user expirience is more streamlined. It should also be possible to better guard code paths that need to check for specific profile rights. Expected outcome: Profiles should be more user frendly then before and not be an after thought. Being able to easily add more profile features is the big ultimate goal, as we want to support profiles for kids, that automatically hide media that's not for them. Just as an example. Skills preferred: C++ Possible mentors: Difficulty: Hard Type: Core development

Addon Checker Expansion

  • Expand addon checker to validate code and do statistical analysis
  • Automatic addon checker for binary addons

Addon Submissions

  • Write a tool to easily submit addons to our repo

Gaming in Kodi

Retroplayer

  • Developer Garbear has broken down the Retroplayer project into manageable pieces including input, core, game addons, peripheral addons, netplay, a game library implementation, and shaders to do things like emulate a CRT monitor. Any one of these pieces could make an excellent summer project depending on your familiarity in the area. Many pieces are currently being worked on or are near completion, but many more could use help from a student familiar with the area. Visit the retroplayer section of the Kodi forum to see all the major projects still to do.

other ideas

  • Using libFuzz to fuzz Kodi
  • Using fruit or similar to use DI in Kodi and write tests
  • Use machine learning to improve suggestions
  • Add a picture library
  • High quality scalers for OpenGL(GLSL). Scale Y and UV plane separately

More

We feel it is important to note that, while we are interested in a focus on the listed three areas, we would like to stress passion, expertise, and creativity above all else. If you would like to do something completely different, definitely send in that proposal. The ideas listed above are, as always, merely suggestions. We will be interested in any idea, so long as you can communicate your interest, your background, and your solution the problem.

Students project proposal ideas

Submit your own proposals on the Kodi GSoC forum. They can be as big or as small as you feel you can comfortably accomplish between PROJECT START DATE and PROJECT END DATE. In the end, it's better to have a smaller, completed project, rather than a larger, incomplete project.

To submit a proposal idea:

  1. Copy the text from #Outline for proposals.
  2. Create a new forum post HERE and paste the text.
  3. Fill out everything using your specific proposal.