GSoC Second Month

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 like me to do more work than what was stated on my proposal, which is a good thing, but hard I guess.

I have encoded a group of sequences using SVT-AV1, lib-aom and rav1e. This exposed me to building many different encoders and see the iner-workings of each of them. I can see how each encoder is slightly different when I decode them with my metadata extraction version of dav1d.

Took part in some teachings from members of the community. I realise I am not the best at all the terminology and knowing all the coding tools under the sun, but I do something about it. I was invited to learn more about the encoding process by one of the contributors in the community :) It was pretty cool.

I also have written two blog posts in a month. Hope it's not to bad to read :))

Created the skeleton structure for metadata extraction, I have learnt about getopt and how to get arguments from the cli. I have greatly improved my knowledge on scope within a program. I know how static and extern effect the scope of a piece of code and how to include a file. 

I have learnt of the JSON syntax and also a lot about how a decoder spits out the information it gets. moreover, the way it gets given the data in the bit stream isn't always favourable! The work I have been doing so far can output metadata from each frame:

What I would like to do before the month is over (tomorrow) - sort out the syntax pipeline issues and create a merge request to get my stuff landed. I feel I have a significant amount of infrastructure for the metadata extract project I have been working on. I am proud of the work I have done and even if I do not get to participate in GSoC next month, I try my best to get what I have done, landed. 

Future work for next month?

I would like to write a quick documentation for people to read so they know how my stuff works and also I would like to share what I have done in a water cooler so that people can start to take advantage of my work.

I would also like to compare my work with aom Analyser to see what else I could do to improve my work. Once I have landed my contributions, I would like to get peoples feedback and see where I can go from there.

Reflections

GSoC has been a good learning experience. I have learnt a few things about myself which I didn't know about. I've been told my communication skills were poor and I hadn't noticed until now. 

I sit at my desk doing the work I have planned and I never took a step back to at me from my supervisors eyes. I did that fairly recently and it surprised me. They literally don't know what I'm doing half the time! I honestly don't know how to get better at communicating, you might say its easy, but it really isn't. 

I've done some self reflecting and I think its down to a lack of self-confidence because of a lack of understanding of my work. My friends tell me I know the topic really well but sometimes I just get the feeling of "why me?" there are loads of better people that could do this job. If I don't make it through this month of GSoC, I would like to think it has helped me identify these issues regarding communication and self-confidence.

Thank you to all the people who have given me the opportunity to do this and I have no doubt I will continue to contribute to anything codec related in the future.

-Tom.