[FFmpeg-user] New task ideas for GSoC and Outreachy

[Marton Balint]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2016, Kieran Kunhya wrote:

> Hello,
>
> It seems that we're trotting out the same old GSoC and Outreachy tasks that
> students haven't picked for years.
>
> So, in the spirit of open source, I'd like to ask you, the developers and
> users what students should work on.

An important thing we miss I think is failover on input and output side.

Many people use ffmpeg to transcode some kind of network stream to 
whatever format, but AFAIK there is no way to specify multiple inputs and 
do failover between them if one of them fails / timeouts. Also there is no 
way to force an input to gracefully restart/reconnect in case of 
timeout or error.

The same can be said on the output side, if one of the network outputs 
blocks or fails for any reason, the other outputs will block or fail too, 
which makes ffmpeg unsuitable to stream to two targets simultaneously for 
redundancy purposes. A graceful reconnect on timeout or error and 
non-blocking outputs would be useful here too.

This may be implemented as a function of ffmpeg.c or as an input/output 
protocol if possible.

Regards,
Marton