Re: 25 years of VDR

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 more than a year, marking them as "outdated" if they did not respond 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