Google Announces Some Very Interesting GSoC 2021 Projects

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Announces Some Very Interesting GSoC 2021 Projects

Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GSoC-2021-Accepted-Projects

[schmidtbag]

Most of these are great projects. Things that ought to get done but nobody really feels like doing. Let's hope all of these succeed.

[doublez13]

69 countries... nice

[bachchain]

Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts

I guess Stadia's life support fund has to come from somewhere

[SteamPunker]

- The Intel Video and Audio for Linux project is hoping to see a VVC parser for GStreamer. VVC (Versatile Video Coding) is the H.265/HEVC successor and to get GStreamer support started, the hope is to make a codec parser this summer as a first step.

[..]

- H.264/HEVC ARM64 10-bit Assembly SIMD code for FFmpeg along with various other CPU-specific tuning for FFmpeg across multiple GSoC projects.

Google is a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media and has been pushing royalty-free video codecs such as VP8, VP9 and AV1. So why are they funding any further development on H.264 and VVC/H.266, which are patent-encumbered and require royalties to use?

Okay, in the case of H.264 I can somewhat understand it, since it's so pervasive and hard to avoid. But why spend money on furthering H.266, when such money could be better spent by investing it in AV1 and a future AV2 codec? GSoC would be an excellent opportunity to find new talent to help improve these open-source technologies further.

[guglovich]

What's the problem with Xfce? I only have MTP that hangs.