Background

Gernot Ziegler, Geofront's owner, has spent the last eight years on improving his software skills in Linux programming in general and Video/GPU programming in particular. He is one of the pioneers in video programming in Linux, and has no trouble diving into the depths of the kernel to search for bugs or create a kernel driver module for new hardware. Motion JPEG and Video/VR programming for Unix are some of his specialities.

He has further created a new MJPEG format called movtar that made it possible to create MJPEG streams in a standardized way, months before AVI and Quicktime MJPEG read/write support was introduced in Linux. libmovtar, the support library, is still commonly used in Linux for intermediate storage of recorded streams before they are converted to MPEG2.

During his diploma thesis he concentrated on SGI machines, especially the Onyx2 series. During that time hesigned an DVD/MPEG2-Player for the SGI Onyx2, based on OpenSource software from the Linux community. This player will maps its video output on 3D-polygons, thus being able to provide DVD/MPEG2-Playback in any VR-environment (or to play stereo-3D MPEGs). See TexMPEG and MPEG Z/Alpha to the left for more information.

After receiving an employment as a PhD researcher, he now has time to focus on the capabilities of state-of-the-art computer graphics hardware for the purpose of image processing. His old interests in video playback and some contacts in the media art scene resulted in the making of Gstsert, demonstrating 3D video effects by using the latest GPU hardware capabilities.

Skills

Gernot excels in combining OpenSource usage with his Unix knowledge and his large contact network.
He is not afraid to take new challenges and has no problem in organizing and structuring his own work as soon as a target is set. He is communicative, talks light-heartedly in front of people and has good skills in explaining complicated circumstances in a simple and understandable manner.

His OpenSource background makes it easy for him to analyze and reuse others' source code, and structure and document it so that other developers can easily use it without needing to know about its internals. Long experience with Linux gives him a good sense for the usability of different GPL source codes that are distributed on the Internet. That allows him to reuse source code for customer application, even if they are not bundled within a defined API. This often accelerates development tremendously.
OpenSource community networking has also trained him in noticing quickly when a person is a good information resource on a certain topic, and adds him/her immediately to his contact network.

He also believes that the best achievements are made when the information flow between all involved parts is constantly maintained. That is why thorough at following up requests and starts generating documentation for his source code immediately as he takes on a new task.

For latest update on his current skills, see his CV.

Possible application

UNIX multimedia consultant (Video, VR, OpenGL)
UNIX video application developer
Driver development for UNIX systems
Code recovery/reusal consultant
Technical documentation writer
(can be combined with language services)
Developer education/training/PR