Congrats and huge thanks to the best piece of software I've ever used. I started using VDR back in 2004 when my daughter was three years old and she could handle it all by herself. In my pursuit for making tv-cards work in Linux and VDR I managed to get my name in the Linux kernel author-list and gained so much knowledge I now make a great living from what I learned those days together with my hardware education. A profession in which I also used Klaus's brilliant Eagle eCAD software. Even though I don't use VDR today I have TerraBytes of movies and series stored on my drives from it to my great joy. Hugely appreciated by my wife and kids when we come together and watch what they watched when they were little.
/Magnus
Den ons 19 feb. 2025 10:22Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@xxxxxxx> skrev:
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=""> 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emails to those who had not accessed their entry for more than a year, marking them as "outdated" if they did not respond with a confirmation of their entry.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
