BD Rebuilder development coming to an end?

[Kerry56]

It seems that jdobbs is considering taking the time limits off the next version of BD Rebuilder. It may be a "finished" version with far less being done in development of the program from this point forward. See his comments in the second post of this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=171302

Its been an heroic effort putting this program together over the last six years, and there is no other program that can match it in Blu-ray backups. Many thanks to jdobbs and his group of helpers at Doom9, and to the software authors whose tools are used in BD Rebuilder.

I have to wonder if he is planning on releasing a commercial program dealing with H265 that will be used in the new generation of Blu-ray discs?

[imhh1]

sad news, but i think the program is complete and is working 100%.
BEST tool by far if you are working with hd videos / bluray disc .
And it's free !!

[mail2tom]

Sad that it's going the same way as MultiAVCHD did. I consider both of them as money well spent.

[jman98]

sad news, but i think the program is complete and is working 100%.

It is not working 100% and it never has. Maybe 98%. But definitely not 100%. It still as often as not can't handle interlaced VC-1 video, but as that is fairly rare many people think it works on everything simply because they've never tried it with interlaced VC-1 video. It's a good program though.

Basically he's stopping it because he never made much from donations for it. He said that 10 people gave more to the project than everybody else combined and he felt that it was unfair to have so many people use it on the expense of others, but he accepts responsibility for putting it out as donationware.

I still have a small amount of lingering resentment over the fact that when the program first came out, he personally decided who could and could not use it and at the time the Doom9 forum on it was filled with self-congratulatory posts about how cool it was to be one of the privileged few who had access to it. I've never donated to it as a result of that. But this is not to digress into a round of Doom9 bashing. Even without updates it's likely to continue to work for the vast majority of BluRays that come out in the future. But had he not personally restricted access to it and the people he deigned to allow to use it not been complete and utter asses about their good fortune, maybe I would have been willing to contribute something.

[HemLok]

It's an unfortunate development. In virtually all ways I still consider it the best option available even with the bugs that may exist. I really haven't run into any in quite some time but I know they exist. At the end of the day, however, companies like DVDFab, DVD-Ranger, TDMore, etc, are raking in money with shareware programs that [attempt to] compete with BD Rebuilder. Sadly, "donationware" software is simply seen as freeware to the vast majority of users and that's the flaw in the model. No one wants to actually donate. Those that do can't cover for those who don't. The shareware developers make money, generally have a team of developers rather than a single person, and can focus all their time on the software. jdobbs works alone on his own free time. Without money coming in as both an incentive and to pay the bills, etc, then it's only a matter of time before a project stumbles. It also doesn't help when some people simply drive a developer batty by being obnoxious.

I did my part. Unfortunately, a ****load of other people didn't.

[Pirum]

Also. considering the price for empty BD-Rs, one would imagine "everybody" would make backup copies of their Blurays - however, that doesn't seem to be the case. Bluray-burners are still seen as something most computers can do without. A pity. I don't even know people burning Blurays, everyone is using either Netflix or torrents for their mediaboxes. Most people can't be bothered these days to make backups of anything it seems. And while I don't like DVDFab, it IS easier to use than BD-rebuilder if you are an average user barely able to download and install a program. So, using optical disks seems to take too much effort.

For me, having kids, being able to make backup copies of DVDs and Blurays, and compress them to cheap DVD5 or BD25 is really important. A kid can ruin a DVD in minutes, a Bluray disk might last a little while longer but not much...

I was looking for a printer that could write to blank DVDs, had to look really hard and buy a fairly expensive Canon printer - some years ago several models printed to disks, this year just one model. Disks are going out, partly because of streaming, partly because of Cinavia, and I'm not so sure media companies will benefit from Cinavia - it might drive people to actually pirate 100% instead. But, that's another discussion.

I'm very thankful to jdobbs. It's totally understandable and fine that he slows down or quits development.

I might send a little donation again, not because he asks for it or to "encourage" him to continue development, but because he deserves it.