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the counter started sending emails to those who had not accessed their entry for more than a year, marking them as "outdated" if they did not respond with a confirmation of their entry.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