What now ?

J

jhyler

Member
I like VRD a lot, but I'm not particularly hopeful that a sale of the company would bail us out of this predicament. Anybody who buys the company will do so with the expectation of making their money back and turning a profit and I would not be at all surprised to see subscriptions or annual license fees instituted, outsourcing technical support or turning support into a profit center, etc. To be clear, I don't think such a business model would work for VRD - I think it would drive the lightweights away and the heavyweights to some of the more heavyweight apps out there - but I can see it being tried.

I'm also not surprised to learn that VRD phones home every once in a while even after activation; it's certainly not the only example of licensed software that does so. I've taken what limited actions I can to keep it going for me. I've built a few virtual machines to host VRD; their clocks won't ever be allowed to advance much and I've configured them without network adapters. Obviously, there's no guarantee that will be enough to keep VRD going forever. But nothing is forever (!), and I feel I've done what I can.
 
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J

jirim100

Member
Dan203 said:
VideoReDo was unique in that it was designed from the beginning to remove commercials from TV shows. That's it. People have used it for other purposes over the years, but it's primary functionality was, and still is, to remove commercials from TV recordings. We added new formats over the years, and new output functionality to increase the number of devices/platforms those TV shows could be consumed on, but the core tenet of the program was always to remove commercials from TV shows.
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During 10 years I manually removed with VRD commercials from 32000 (!) recorded TV shows.
 
W

Winnewup

Member
Dan203 said:
...
VideoReDo was unique in that it was designed from the beginning to remove commercials from TV shows. That's it. People have used it for other purposes over the years, but it's primary functionality was, and still is, to remove commercials from TV recordings.
...
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Hello,
this is exactly the reason why I love the program so much. It is simple to use and if you want to replace a broken part from another source you can use deeper parameters to adjust the piece of the vid from the other source and put it together again. I tried some other programs before, but nearly all of them recode everything and the output often was not as good as the original (e.g. audio). And I always save to ts-stream (like the source) and everything is still in the output file (audio, videotext, undertitles, ...). I don't know any other program with this (actually simple) function, someone else?

I totaly understand Dan; if he is a good code writer but not the business man ... we have to accept this. I wouldn't trust myself to run a company with a small base either. There are a lot of dependencies and imponderables and for this you have to have financial reserves in addition to an income from current business.

I haven't completely given up hope that there will be a continuation or that there will be a final version without activation; I would also be willing to pay a fee for a final version.

Regards
Frank
 
Z

zhenya_hacker

Member
Winnewup said:
I haven't completely given up hope that there will be a continuation or that there will be a final version without activation; I would also be willing to pay a fee for a final version.
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Literally, +1.
Moreover, since VRD is the program that I use literally every day for years, I feel like there is a point to make a patreon-like subscription given to Mr. Rosen`s family as a thankfulness for VRD existence and to keep up VRD-related online services like activation server, message board, etc.
Obviously it will not be enough to keep VRD alive as commercial product being developed&evolved, but it will be enough to make it not go to history completely.
 
Dan203

Dan203

Ex-Senior Developer
Don’t want to get anyone's hopes up but I did figure out which company we got the Pro license manager from and found a git repo with the DLLs and keys I need to do a release build. However the server the Pro license manager ran on died in that crash back in August, so I need the company to help me set up a new one. I've reached out to them to see if they'll help. If they do (big if) then I should be able to get Pro back up and running. 🤞
 
X

Xizer

Member
Appreciate you Dan. I know you're no longer legally obligated to provide support for us so you are doing it out of the kindness of your heart at this point. Unlike some companies where the developers saw fit to leave us out to dry as soon as the company went under (DDD TriDef)
 
Dan203

Dan203

Ex-Senior Developer
I was able to get access to the Pro key server. So if anyone needs help moving their key to a new system I should be able to help.

I don’t exactly know how it works yet, but we can figure it out.
 
B

billmich

Member
so there is the possibility that I turn on my computer one day, open up VRD, and ... and .... and... nothing happens,...... it no longer works?
and we don't know when (or if) that day is coming?
 
M

mayorville

Member
As long as the activation server stays active, there shouldn't be any issues. Some of us have mentioned that we are willing to help contribute to keep the server running and even going as far as buying the software again, if we can get a version that we don't have to rely on a server to keep active.

To respond to your message, even if the server goes down the software will continue to work, but (if I remember correctly) Dan203 believes it does a yearly check, but he's not exactly sure what happens if it can't contact the server as he didn't code the activation piece.

billmich said:
so there is the possibility that I turn on my computer one day, open up VRD, and ... and .... and... nothing happens,...... it no longer works?
and we don't know when (or if) that day is coming?
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Dan203

Dan203

Ex-Senior Developer
I already have a server I use for my side projects that I pay for so the consumer one wouldn't be a big deal. The Pro one is $40/mo for the hosted server, so that one would be a bit of an issue.
 
B

billmich

Member
Thank you Dan203, I have a non-pro one.

Directly to you, my apologies for not reaching out earlier as I hadn't been checking in because everything was running smoothly.
Condolences to you, but also congratulations on obtaining a new position as well.

Thank you for all you do and continue to do
 
U

Uosdwis

Member
Dan203 said:
There are a million other video editing apps out there with that Premiere style multi-track UI, or the Movie Maker style storyboard UI, but they’re designed for a different purpose.

VideoReDo was unique in that it was designed from the beginning to remove commercials from TV shows. That's it. People have used it for other purposes over the years, but it's primary functionality was, and still is, to remove commercials from TV recordings. We added new formats over the years, and new output functionality to increase the number of devices/platforms those TV shows could be consumed on, but the core tenet of the program was always to remove commercials from TV shows.

Even on the Pro side our main customers were broadcasters and syndicators that used the program to chop out some commercials to replace them with other commercials.

It is amazing at doing that one thing and I'm not aware of any other program that exists which specifically mimics that niche functionality.
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I've used Comskip by this guy Kaashoek for a long time (also seems to be abandoned in development), which is good and does things VRD doesn't with more granularity, but also VRD ad detection usually works remarkably well itself, and has the added bonus of being ready to cut them out "in house."
 
dlflannery

dlflannery

Moderator
Uosdwis said:
I've used Comskip by this guy Kaashoek for a long time (also seems to be abandoned in development), which is good and does things VRD doesn't with more granularity, but also VRD ad detection usually works remarkably well itself, and has the added bonus of being ready to cut them out "in house."
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Why are you saying Comskip seems to be abandoned in development? I’ve just looked at the Comskip forum and the comskip.org web page and things look pretty current to me, plus didn’t find any statements about quitting development. It is strange that the comskip github page that shows up when you Google comskip does appear to be stale. But much newer builds are linked via the comskip.org page. I’m guessing Eric just decided not to use github anymore.

FYI, VideoReDoAutoProcessor (link in signature) has the option of subsituting Comskip for Ad Detective using any version of Comskip and automatically detects whether it’s a donator version.
 
S

stokepade

New member
i totally understand. i have used this sware from years and have found it to be the best for my home use. No one could have forseen this. but please try to keep us in the loop. i think we need to start a reddit up if someone knows how so we can monitor the situation if the site goes down.
mobdro 2022
 
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J

johnww328

New member
Has anyone considered releasing the code and making it open source? I'm not sure if there is any revenue stream that way for the family, but to the extent that people want this software, a community taking care of the code without anyone owning it might be possible? If you know Moodle, which is open source, I was thinking about something along those lines. VRD is very good at what it does and if selling and/or managing the company doesn't appeal to Dan's family, then his legacy of writing an amazing piece of software could be kept alive and perhaps an even larger community would develop in an open source environment. VRD might be huge as open source. Everyone seems to agree he was a great guy, maybe the software itself could advertise his legacy, then it becomes a matter of this is what he left the whole world and the millions (yes, as open source, millions might use this) that benefit from what this man did. Comments?
 
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