GPAC report from GSoC 2016

This was the first Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the GPAC team. GSoC is a program organized by Google “Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an online, international program designed to encourage university student participation in open source software development”.

Practically, Google selects organizations around open-source projects (such as GPAC, full list). The organizations publish subjects (ours) with mentors to take care of the selected student(s). Then students can apply for GSoC during their summer.

For organizations, Google also organizes a mentor event at Google’s office in the Silicon Valley. It is a great opportunity to meet other mentors from all over the world. GSoC is an opportunity to get new contributors.

For students, GSoC is a huge opportunity to get financed to work on open-source projects. Students get a stipend (that is going to be modulated per country starting at next year) that covers their expenses. It is a real journey into freedom.

Below is what our student Abdul Rauf from India said about his GSoC. Abdul was an excellent student for us:

It was a very successful journey with GPAC during GSoC time and I am very happy that I was selected for GPAC organisation.
My project was to create a video decoding module on Android using the low level media API i.e. MediaCodec API. During the project, I faced some trouble with the MediaCodec C++ API due to little to no documentation on the internal working of the API. Also, the color format of the decoded video was not known. This was the most difficult part of my project but with the help of my mentors who guided and provided me with different resources, I completed it on time. My other tasks included overhauling the user interface of the “osmo4” player on Android and also creating a config file editor. Both the tasks were more related to Android development and were relatively easy than the first one. It felt really nice when the work I did during summer was merged into GPAC.
I feel really blessed to have such responsive mentors specially Romain and Rodolphe who were always ready to help and I need to thank them for guiding and helping me every time there was an issue. It was a very good learning experience for me.