DAD: Could you please introduce yourself briefly? What are your
spare time interests beside computing? LT: As you can see I'm 26 years old, I study informatics and I work
at the local H-Bone center (H-Bone is the base (bone) of the
Hungarian internet network) as a system administrator. In my spare
time I read books (I have a big book collection) and listen music. DAD: Developing software for Amiga is probably only your hobby.
What is your formal education and what do you do for living? LT: Oh, I already answered some parts above. Right, it is my hobby,
but (as I wrote) I study informatics and I work at a computer related
place. DAD: When was your first contact with Amiga? When did you start
using it and developing for it? LT: Hmmm... I saw the first Amiga (an A500) at my friend's place in
1990 and I was really amazed. I bought my first A500 in 1992
(09.09.), and I wrote my first program 1 or 2 days later (of course I
had programming experience because I coded since 1984/85 on C16 and
later on C64). DAD: By looking at your website everybody can see that you have a
really big collection of Amigas. When did you start collecting them?
Which Amiga are you most proud of? Do you have any plans to further
expand this collection? LT: I buy every Amiga that I see and has a suitable price. I never
thought about collecting Amigas, I just bought one and another one
and so on. So nowadays I have a relatively big collection. Hmmm...
I'm proud of my A4000, because it is a bit special (it has an 030 CPU
on the motherboard), but I like the good old A1000's (I have 2 Amigas
1000) and the others, too. And I plan to expand my collection with
an A3000 soon. (I hope so ;) DAD: What is the configuration of the Amiga you are using for your
work? Do you have any plans upgrading it in the near future? LT: At the moment my main Amiga is an A4000 with CyberStorm MKII
(060/50) SCSI and a PicassoIV (with all add-on's), with a CD-R, 21"
monitor and a 386 bridgeboard with an ISA ethernet card. I am
thinking about buying a PPC board, but I'm not really sure about
that. DAD: Your programs are all related to low-level graphics and video.
Where did you get the knowledge necessary for writting such software? LT: Good question... It is just a result of some years of trying.
I never studied it, so it was mostly a result of trying. And I was
always interested in digital graphics, I think it is the most
impressive part of the computer technology. It is really amazing to
dig out the images and animations from an encoded file, I think. DAD: A special version of your video player MooVId is now a part of
AmigaOS 3.9. How did it come to this agreement? Who did the first
step: you or Haage & Partner? LT: It was a step from Haage & Partner, they contacted my
distributor (Epic Marketing, German division), and after I prepared
the OS version I dealed directly with Haage & Partner. DAD: There are 3 versions of MooVId available: the OS 3.9 one, the
PIV one and the ordinary one. What are their features and
differences between them? LT: The differences are minimal. Let's compare them to the ordinary
version: the OS3.9 is a cut down version of the ordinary one: i
removed the PPC and the Indeo support, and the video overlay (PIP)
window is not resizable. The PIV-MooVId is a special version, but
this one supports only the PicassoIV's overlay under p96. I did it
for Village Tronic, because they supported me some years ago. So the
ordinary one called 'MooVId' is the 'full' one, the others are
limited somehow. DAD: You probably have to fight 2 problems while developing MooVId:
low processing power of Amigas and expensive licences for movie
format information. How do you cope with them? Which of the two is
a bigger problem? LT: The biggest problem are the licence fees and the limited
information. That is the main reason why MooVId does not support the
new QuickTime codec 'Sorenson', however the QT3/4/5 fileformat
(including QT streaming video files) is supported. The low
processing power is not a big problem, because you can optimize the
codecs, I think the main problem is the relatively slow CPU->Video
bus. (10-15 MB/s is maximum on Amiga at the moment, and it is not
that much) DAD: What are your plans for further development of MooVId? LT: More codecs support and some new features. First I would like
to add mp3 audio support (because it is the audio format of the new
codecs, like OpenDivx and Thrivx). DAD: Could you please describe shortly your other programs and tell
us what is the status of their development? LT: My first programs were the Savage drivers for ShapeShifter
emulator. I do not develop them futher (I think I can't make them
faster). And I have some programs for Paloma (Paloma is the Video-in
module of PicassoIV). I want to update them (add AHI audio support
for PalomAVI), and do a PPC version of my PalomaPEG realtime MPEG1
video capture program. And I'm the co- author of the RiVA MPEG1
player and I would like to update its system parser to support MPEG2
videos. That is the current line of my programs. DAD: What are you plans for the future? Are you going to develop
any new programs? What about development for other computer
platforms? LT: We plan to write an mp2/mp3 audio decoder for RiVA, because
mpega is not fast enough. I'm not really interested in other
platforms, but maybe I will write some stuff for Palm. (Currently I
own 2 Palms and I like them, but the PalmOS is sadly too MacOS like,
a Palm with AmigaOS would be far better ;) DAD: What's you opinion on other computer platforms? Which of them
do you also use or plan to use? LT: I'm using PC's (at my workplace) mostly with Linux, and some
also with Windows, and I have some Dec Alphas here with OSF/1
(Digital's Unix) and some Motorola powered Cisco routers with IOS. I
never wrote programs for them (except some small ones), because I'm
not really interested in that. I'm an Amiga fan, and when I use
other computers, I realise what I miss at them :) DAD: What do you think about the latest announcements from Amiga,
Inc.? LT: I'm sceptic (as always). But when there'll be somemething real,
I'll say more. (I'm a bit sad due to lots of never released hard-
and software.) DAD: Which computer do you think will be the next one you are going
to buy? LT: It will be a good old Amiga 3000, for sure ;) And maybe
AmigaOne? DAD: Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us in the
end? LT: Nothing special, I just wish happy computing to all Amiga lovers
all around the World ;) (And I hope there will be something new at
the hardware side of Amiga, too.)