Am 19.02.25 um 09:46 schrieb Klaus Schmidinger:
25 years ago today, on February 19, 2000, I released the very first
version of the VDR. I never thought that this project would keep me busy
for a quarter of a century.
I would like to use this special anniversary to thank the many users who
have contributed to the further development of VDR with suggestions,
patches, bug fixes and plugins.
At its peak, there were more than two thousand VDR users around the
world (who registered with the VDR User Counter), of which today there
are still a good 800 active. With the availability of media libraries
and streaming, interest in a DVB recorder has naturally waned. However,
there are also advantages to being able to record films and series under
your own control without being exposed to the risk that they will
disappear from the online offering at some point.
On the page https://www.tvdr.de/cgi/vdr-counter?action=summary I have
shown the history of the number of users over the years (generated from
the counter's log file). In the first years of VDR, the number of users
increased rapidly, peaking at over 2200. In March 2015, the counter
started sending emails to those who had not accessed their entry for
more than a year, marking them as "outdated" if they did not respond
with a confirmation of their entry. This caused the number of active
users to drop abruptly by almost 800, and in the following years it
continued to decrease. Apparently many of the initial 2200 users only
used VDR for a short time. In October 2024, this mechanism was revised
so that those who have been notified once since 2015 will be notified
again on a regular basis and have the option to either confirm or delete
their entry. Here too, the number of active users fell by several
hundred and settled at just over 800 in January 2025.
Perhaps the "dark figure" is higher, because not everyone reads the VDR-
Portal or the VDR mailing list. In any case, I still enjoy the project,
and TV without VDR is unthinkable anyway ;-).
I wish all VDR users continued enjoyment with it!
Klaus
Happy 25 Years of VDR. Fight the commercials pest, fight DRM!
y
tom
