Looking for experienced VLC developers

[tomleonard]

We are going to introduce a new full featured, free, GUI plug-in for VLC this summer and are looking for one or more experienced VLC developers to join our team. These contract positions are full- or part-time and involve serving as our VLC internals knowledge base, directed bug fixing and development of some VLC enhancements (eg cd rip and burn).

Our company, Quantum Mana, is working with the Synergy Media Group to launch an internet music distribution service featuring, primarily, independent artists and labels. We are a small group of highly experienced developers, based on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. We live where we choose and use broadband to collaborate. We are committed to delivering quality software products that empower people.

Interested, or simply want to chat and find out what we are doing. Contact me: tom at quantummana dot com.

[Gibalou]

I don't know if you already had a look at the new skinning architecture being developed for VLC (aka skins2). It isn't completely finished yet but is already pretty useable nonetheless (only X11 and win32 ports for now).

My feeling is that it might a lot more useful to work/extend on this new design instead of doing yet another interface.

Unfortunately there isn't any documentation yet on how to produce skins for this new interface but you can always look at the default skin shipped with the VLC sources (share/skins2/default) and look at the code (modules/gui/skins2). Hopefully the documentation will be done soon.

[tomleonard]

We looked at skinning, but our look-and-feel would have been extremely difficult, is not impossible to do. An example is fade-in/fade-out of our console controls while listening to audio and viewing an album cover. Normally, the album cover is displayed. If the mouse is moved over the controls area, they fade in. Move away and they fade out. Many of our graphics are Mac-like for style but fully cross-platform. Given the skin capability at the time we started (October 2003), this wasn't a good choice.

Using wxWindows, the GUI is almost complete. Our main tasks now are tight integration with VLC. As an example, the inability if VLC to play a single cd track makes playlist management impossible. We know how to fix this, but believe it should be part of the base VLC. It' s a feature job we would like someone with VLC internals experience to do for us so we know it's done right. It does, however, require a change to the MRL specification, so it should go through the project team review/approval cycle: a process we don't understand at this point.

[The DJ]

lol, i think even we don't know how we work

anyways. the amount of VLC developers is pretty thin. And some of the people doing the most work in areas you are interested in, already have other jobs to work on. Remember that of the about 15 current developers of VLC, most work (80%) is done by 2 of those 15.

I encourage your efforts highly, but i don't know how many people are able to work for you....
Everyone is always ready to answer questions of course. And who knows, maybe some people get bored this summer