This year’s Google summer of code has been kicked off with a fairly substantial amount of participants. You can still submit an application until April 3rd, to join the roughly 2,500 “graduates”. For those who don’t know what it is, the Google summer of code pairs developing programmers with open source projects and funding. It’s a great program, resulting in advances in some programs that we follow. We’ve talked about several of the groups that will be participating this year, such as the NUI group, rockbox, openstreetmap, and videoLan.

VideoLAN just released VLC media player 0.9.2. VLC is probably the best known open source media player, and supports most audio/video formats without additional codecs. Before VLC, we usually installed buggy codec packs to watch videos in Winamp or Windows Media Player. We’ve found the nightly builds to be pretty stable for the past month, but it’s nice to see the final version released.

Download Squad gushed over the new interface design, but omitted the real change — VideoLAN switched from wxWidgets to the Qt toolkit. Among many changes, Qt allows video effects to be applied without restarting the media.

One of our favorite new features is an adjustments and effects menu for quick picture, sound, and subtitle tweaks. The new version has better support for flash videos (FLV), and will stream from most online video sharing sites. See the full changelog at the VideoLAN wiki, and help out if that’s your thing.

[via Download Squad]