Sunday, August 19, 2018

Welcome to the 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast

Hello,
My name is Douglas from Dynamic Computing, and I am an I.T. Consultant in Tucson, Arizona with a not so hidden hobby of Retro Amiga Computing. My first Amiga was an A500 in 1987 after I outgrew the capabilities of my Vic-20 and then my C-64. My hobby continued long after the dissolution of Commodore and I have since owned ten different Amiga's - Of which I have five or six left.

The 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast is something I thought of to add value to our Amiga Community. There are a lot of Retro gaming podcasts out there - Of which www.amigarama.com is my personal favorite - and I thought the Amiga community could use a different take on things.

I am producing my video and audio as much as possible on Amiga's and for Amiga's. The days of the Video Toaster are over for us, but there is life left in our machines to churn out some more work! While I can't use the Amiga for actual editing and heavy duty transcoding, I can use it for storyboarding, audio editing and some light transcoding. I use FFMPEG utility in Windows and on the Amiga for a lot of the video and audio conversions.

The main goal of 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast is to allow us to actually view and listen to the videos on our beloved hardware, and believe it or not, it works fairly will. I convert all of the MP4 videos from my camera over to MPEG1 videos, 192x144 pixels and play it back with the RiVA MPEG viewer on the Amiga. The results are pretty good even on an AGA machine in 256 colors or on an ECS machine in 16 shades of grey. I also format the audio into MP3 files that play back pretty well on modest Amiga's on almost any MP3 player.

For an extra bit of fun and challenge, I am converting all the videos into .hv Ham6 Video modes for playback on older Amiga's that have hard drives. This is a very clever set of utilities that convert raw .AVI and .WAV files into a HAM6 or HAM8 video that plays back fairly nicely! The files are really big (500MB+ for my 10 minute videos), so it is more a tech demo than an actual practical solution.

My goal is a weekly or bi-weekly publishing schedule as time permits. I encourage you to check out my Youtube page at https://youtu.be/ar5WUsKKvrw and be sure to like and subscribe for the latest notification of new episodes! Enjoy!

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