Summer Sprint in Stockholm

Last weekend some libav developers met in the South Pole offices with additional sponsorship from Inteno Broadband Technology. (And the people at Borgodoro that gave us more chocolate to share with everybody).

Sprints

Since last year the libav started to have sprints to meet up, discuss in person topics that require a more direct media than IRC or Mailing List and usually write some code asking for direct opinions and help.

Who attended

Benjamin was our host for the event. Andreas joined us for the first day only, while Anton, Vittorio, Kostya, Janne, Jan and Rémi stayed both days.

What we did

The focus had been split in a number of area of interests:

  • API: with some interesting discussion between Rémi and Anton regarding on how to clarify a tricky detail regarding AVCodecContext and AVFrame and who to trust when.
  • Reverse Engineering: With Vittorio and Kostya having fun unraveling codecs one after the other (I think they got 3 working)
  • Release 12 API and ABI break
    • What to remove and what to keep further
    • What to change so it is simpler to use
    • If there is enough time to add the decoupled API for avcodec
  • Release 12 wishlist:
    • HEVC speed improvements, since even the C code can be sped up.
    • HEVC extended range support, since there is YUV 422 content out now.
    • More optimizations for the newer architectures (aarch64 and power64le)
    • More hardware accelerator support (e.g. HEVC encoding and decoding support for Intel MediaSDK).
    • Some more filters, since enough people asked for them.
    • Merge some of the pending work (e.g. go2meeting3, the new asf demuxer).
    • Get more security fixes in (with ago kindly helping me on this).
    • … and more …
  • New website with markdown support to make easier for people to update.

During the sprint we managed to write a lot of code and even to push some during the sprint.
Maybe a little too early in the case of asf, but better have it in and get to fix it for the release.

Special mention to Jan for getting a quite exotic container almost ready, I’m looking forward to see it in the ml; and Andreas for reminding me that AVScale is needed sorely by sending me a patch that fixes a problem his PowerPC users are experiencing while uncovering some strange problem in swscale… I’ll need to figure out a good way to get a PowerPC big-endian running to look at it in detail.

Thank you

I want to especially thank all the people at South Pole that welcome me when I arrived with 1 day in advance and all the people that participated and made the event possible, had been fun!

Post Scriptum

  • This post had been delayed 1 week since I had been horribly busy, sorry for the delay =)
  • During the sprint legends such as kropping the sourdough monster and the burning teapot had been created, some reference of them will probably appear in commits and code.
  • Anybody with experience with qemu-user for PowerPC is welcome to share his knowledge with me.

3 thoughts on “Summer Sprint in Stockholm”

  1. 0) There was Trocadero (that’s much more important than any chocolate).

    1) EarthSoft DV is not exotic, those Japanese had *lots* of their own formats.

    2) … they got 3 working … — no, I just got lu_one working.

    3) ASF is actually long time due, you cannot expect a demuxer being tested just by one not very experienced person to work properly in all cases (also it’s your fault as a mentor).

    4) And no-one is going to work on AVScale ever.

Leave a Reply to Kostya Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.