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the counter started sending emails to those who had not accessed their entry for more than a year, marking them as "outdated" if they did not respond with a confirmation of their entry.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
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
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@tvdr.de 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=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
Klaus,
Many congratulations and thanks for VDR.
I've been using it 18 years now and still in daily use, a key part of my multimedia setup. I wrote the vdr-convert script about 10 years ago to keep/transcode old VDR1.x and VRR2.x recordings, still using that to nearly double my effective disk space - which helps when archiving whole series and films, but also to make very much more compact podcasts from radio. At about that time HD came along, I now only use 2 USB DVD-T2 tuners (290e) which are reliable, lower power and less trouble than many others I tried. I added ts2shout and worked with the author of that to stream shoutcast derived from VDR's .ts stream so that Squeeze server/LMS (now Lyrion) can stream live good quality radio much closer to real time, and without relying on the Internet. I even use the running status messages from the log to do various home automation tasks exactly when, say the news comes on.
What a great bit of kit - keep it up!
Richard
On 19/02/2025 8:46, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
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
Wed, Feb 19, 2025 at 09:46:49AM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
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.
Not only that. While the modern TVs reach their planned obsolescence every 10 or so years, VDR keeps working with the same original remote control from more than 20 years ago, even though all other hardware has been replaced. I enjoy the same familiar user interface with not many quirks.
Actually, I would think that we are past the peak quality of TV sets by now. To name an example: At my place, the DVB-T2 reception is pretty bad whenever the outside temperature drops below freezing. My decade-old 22" Samsung "smart" TV handles this very well, I would say sometimes even better than rpihddevice, which occasionally would lose the audio until the channel is changed. I recently got for free a roughly 5-year-old Panasonic. For any small glitch, it would blank the screen for several seconds. It also loves to interrupt the audio and video when I open the EPG, which is much clumsier to navigate than the VDR equivalent. Both "smart" TVs would support recording to an attached USB device, but at least the Samsung adds some stupid encryption. No thanks, I want to own my data, and VDR only changed its format once, in a compatible way.
Okay, for some streaming needs it could be easiest to avoid VDR and simply attach another tiny Linux "desktop" device to another HDMI input, to avoid a dependency on proprietary devices that would stop working when some cloud service is updated every 5 to 10 years.
I wish all VDR users continued enjoyment with it!
Thank you for your great support!
Marko
Well, happy birthday!
Although I'm not that much active any more, and mostly busy with other projects, I still have my VDR with tt6400 card running as my main TV system. I'm part of the 'dark figure' though, never registered on the web site.
Every few years my still hand compiled system even gets updated to the latest version. Thanks for keeping it up! Just the hardware... one hard disk had funny issues with keeping the head on track in the outer areas, and now my beloved Logitech Harmony is slowly dying. The rest, well I hope it holds together as long as possible, things will be hard to replace.
Cheers,
Udo
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Klaus Schmidinger -
Magnus Hörlin -
Marko Mäkelä -
Richard F -
schorpp -
Udo Richter