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GSoC Code Submission

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Hey guys. I read the guidance on submitting your work for final review and it said the best way was to write a blog post to detail how and what I did. I know my mentors are going to read this but I'm writing it as if many people will.  Where do I start, in England we would say I've ridden the hills, meaning there's been many ups and downs but I have managed to still plough on. I think it's closer to what I would think riding the grand canyon would be like, some days were real bad, and others were amazing. I came into GSoC thinking I knew quite a bit about the open source world but I quickly noticed I had no idea :) I just thought I'd bullet point out what I have learnt so far: Use Git and IRC - I've said it loads of times and I will probably say it a few more :) I can see how this has already benefited me and how it will benefit me in the future. Just generally having the confidence to speak up - every week I share my progress and opinion on what I should do nex
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GSoC Second Month

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What have I gained from this month? I can say I have gained so much in 3 specific areas. Programming - I have learnt a lot about c programming and the errors that can come up. Speaking in front of people - I take part in two meetings a week and I can confidently speak in both of them. This was something I couldn't do before GSoC :) Time management skills - I have spent this last month in student flats and I have found it very hard to say no to my friends. I have improved my ability to schedule in time for everything and dedicate my time to work. The Challenges of this month? Applying my knowledge about video codecs to Dav1d. I have had to search for locations to extract the metadata from dav1d and this was hard. But it is rewarding when you find where it's hiding. What I have achieved  this month? Looking back on my proposal, I feel i am a bit behind where I wanted to be, but I'm not that far off. I do think my proposal was taken as a guideline only and my supervisor would
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GSoC First Month

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The Background I became interested with video compression in first year university. I had an open assessment to count the amount of bugs in a live stream and I found it very enjoyable. Once my interest swung to manipulating video from the bit level, I found myself in the library reading about MPEG and the history of video compression standards (weird leap I know).  My university required me to find a one year placement, working somewhere to gain experience as part of my course. After a while and few interviews later I found myself working for TNO in the Netherlands on the Versatile Video Codec standard. I was looking at implementing a specific way of encoding motion vectors within 360 video sequences. This got me deep in the code base and I learnt more than I imagined I would about codec tools and their uses. Due to Coronavirus, I was let go from the company and I applied to GSoC and contribute to the VideoLan community through a decoder called dav1d . I have the goal of creating a me
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