Hi Gwern, On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Gwern Branwen wrote:
I just checked H.263 and it looks like it does not require patent licensing at all (it is created by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG)) so one can write H.263 in Haskell and release freely without patent licensing issues.
So writing H.263 in Haskell could be a good GSoC project. One mentioned that GHC produce slow code, well H.263 could be a good test case to improve GHC optimization over time. In The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, Haskell has some catching up to do. :)
It does sound like a reasonably discrete task, and it sounds like you have a use for it; but I wonder if it's doable in a single summer?
I have no idea, I have not dig deeper into H.263 C source code but I guess it should be quite trivial as it is a black box with video frame input and output with several parameters for encoding and just frame in/out for decoding. That could be a seed to create Haskell library of video/audio codecs. One mentioned that C based ffmpeg library is buggy with memory leaks left and center (and probably right too :) Ouch!
gwern
Jamie