Google Summer of Code 2023 Work Product Submission

Student: Soham Gupta

Organisation: VideoLAN

Project: Improve Chromecast Support (subtitles)

Introduction

Over the past 3 months, I had the opportunity to work on the VLC project for Google Summer of Code 2023. It was an invaluable learning experience that helped me grow my skills in software development and open source contribution. In this blog, I'll summarize my work and key learnings.

About the Project

πŸŽ₯ The project involved enhancing the capabilities of VLC's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) module by:

I worked primarily on the chromecast-hls branch under the guidance of my mentor Alaric SΓ©nat and org admins Thomas Guillem and Jean-Baptiste Kempf.

Work Summary

Here are some highlights of what I was able to accomplish over the course of the program:

Transcoding Bug Fix

H.265/HEVC Video Codec Implementation

Chromecast Performance Improvements

Subtitle Blending

Testing Subtitle Blending (Windows Build)

SRT Format

./vlc.exe video.mp4 --input-slave=sub.srt --sout="chromecast{ip=[ip address]}" --demux-filter=cc_demux --no-plugins-cache -vv | cat -

ASS Format

./vlc.exe video.mp4 --input-slave=sub.ass --sout="chromecast{ip=[ip address]}" --demux-filter=cc_demux --no-plugins-cache -vv | cat -  

WebVTT Format

./vlc.exe video.mp4 --input-slave=sub.vtt --sout="chromecast{ip=[ip address]}" --demux-filter=cc_demux --no-plugins-cache -vv | cat -

Tracing Flush sout callback

Contributions

Over the course of GSoC 2023, I made the following contributions to the VLC project: