D post boss, D post (Q&A)

[dani82]

most of you could care less, but for this loner, it's a big deal.

well, for my 500 post, i thought i'd do something... well, pretty much the same thing (weird thread titles)

here some Q&A for Doom9 (that i wish to know), unless someone can anwser them:


01. besides you, who were the orginal MODs when the forum started?, if any
02. who was the 1st member (non-MOD) of the forum?
03. who was the 1st member to be promoted to MOD?
04. who was the 1st member to get banned or how many?, if ever
05. what was the first question ever asked here; what was yours?
06. where can i find the first guide you wrote?
07. what was the first ripping/encoding program?
08. in my profile, it tells me when i'd joined, but if you kept track, can you tell me my membership ID# ?
09. anybody know what was one of the 1st dvd movie to be ever release?
10. it's none of my business, but has the government or dvd industries ever tried to contact you?
11. only you should answer this, Doom9, where are you located? your chose to answer it or not.

[Doom9]

phew, lots of questions I can't even answer.

A little forum history: It all started in September 2000, when PX3, the guy who took over mpeg2avi development, suggested to me to create my own forum. Until that time I was hanging out on the pcdvd boards (they were usually closed after a while due to cracks floating around), and the first digital digest board (a delphi board.. horrible forum software). I set up the board on ezboard.com. Roughly a year later, ezboard decided to make some money with their service and started plastering the free forums with ads. They offered an option for admins to make the whole forum ad-free, but since the forum was steadily growing, even in 2001 I'd have to pay thousands of dollars, an amount I simply couldn't afford. There was also an option to make your own account ad-free, for I think $5 per year.

I did that and suggested to everyone to do the same. Those that did were specially earmarked in the member's list and so I noted that hardly anybody spent the money. At was in fall 2001 that I met a few people who suggested that I run my own independent forum. The guy who eventually ended up suggesting a forum software (vbb, the same we use now) and provided the intial hosting (that we've been able to use free of charge until the server problems earlier this year), was mask666.. he is user 1 on this board (still is, though he's never around, and I removed his admin status a long while ago). I was user and admin 2 (signed up on October 8th 2001).

We then had the existing handful of moderators come over to the new board, and jelsoft, makers of vbb, imported our ezboard into this one. that procedure was very painful and we ended up having to shut everything down for a 2nd import and database reconstruction until we could go on. At that point we had less than 10 moderators, and about 6000 members, all of whom were adressed via email (the first and only time in my life I sent out a number of emails that would automatically make me a spammer these days), and obviously hundreds of them bounced.

Now, since the ezboard is long gone, I'm afraid there's not much history I can still verify before the creation of the board we're using nowadays.

01. besides you, who were the orginal MODs when the forum started?, if anyIn the ezboard age, there were no mods for quite a while.. I think we had about 2000-3000 users until I decided that I just couldn't handle it anymore on my own.
2)Perhaps PX3? I really can't say
3) I also don't remember - but it might have been ookami - he's one of the members that's been around forever (though sadly he retired).
4) No idea here either.. I think there was one single ban on ezboard, but since all the records are gone I can't be sure.
5) My first message was a welcome message, that much I'm sure of. Other than that, even if the old ezboard would still exist, to facilitate the move over to this place I actually deleted all posts in the old board after the import process had completed, and I removed all the subforums but one over there - but I just checked, and ezboard no longer has my board.
6) on a CD labelled DVD Software that is in my CD rack. It's a wordpad piece, updated a few times until I switched over to HTML guides. If there's enough interest I can post it here. I don't think I have the corresponding rippack anymore though (and since it would include the original DeCSS I'd not distribute it either.. even though it's a rather moot point it is DeCSS that the MPAA initially went after and other ripping programs were left alone)
7) dvdrip perhaps? that was a hook into intervideo's dvd playback filters that would grab frames from the video stream.. at that time (1999), DivX was only getting started. I never could get dvdrip working. DoD Speed Ripper was the first descrambling program - it came out in October 1999, and was a cli program and quite complex to use. I first heard news about this on inmatrix.com and after a few days of searching I finally found it. DeCSS came next, soon thereafter. There was a 2nd version of dodsrip that also had a GUI.

mpeg2avi was probably the forst reasonable DivX conversion tool, but it had real problems with NTSC stuff if it wasn't pure FILM. Audio conversion was done with ac3dec (ac3 -> wav), then with the radius (franhofer) mp3 acm codec. flaskmpeg was the first integrated program that did both audio and video and had a GUI (okay, dvdrip had a gui but as I said... I never could get it working so I didn't do any DVD ripping from mid 99 until the end of 99)

8)You have user ID 846 so you were the 846th guy to sign up.

9) I don't recall what happened in the US, but I know that Warner was the first to come out with a bunch of DVDs in October 98 at my place.. the first movie I got on DVD was Mars Attacks.. I won it at a trade fair in Sept 98 and didn't even have a player to play it then. I only bought a player a week or two later, and the first DVD I bought was Outbreak.

10) government: no. DVD industry: depends on who you mean.. some time I talk to people who are into DVD production but I have never had any contact with any movie studio or the MPAA directly. Though the latter actually sent their lawyers at one point when we tried to set up divxresource (look for the news in may/june 2000 there's more info about that).

11) I've been asked many times but I prefer not to divulge that information. It's no secret, but if you know it, please don't broadcast it, I'd like to keep my real life and my online identity separate as good as possible.

[dani82]

06) i'm not interested in the rippack or the decss thing, i just want to see your first guide, email it to me if you could dani882@yahoo.com

11) i'd only asked you to answer it, cause i'd remember some idiot posted alot of info on you; never red it, wasn't right.

[dragongodz]

09. anybody know what was one of the 1st dvd movie to be ever release?
to quote from the dvd f.a.q. at dvd-demystified

Only a handful of DVD titles, mostly music videos, were available in Japan for the November 1996 launch of DVD. The first feature films on DVD appeared in Japan on December 20 (The Assassin, Blade Runner, Eraser, and The Fugitive from Warner Home Video).
The first titles released in the U.S., on March 19, 1997, by Lumivision, authored by AIX Entertainment, were IMAX adaptations: Africa: The Serengeti, Antarctica: An Adventure of a Different Nature, Tropical Rainforest, and Animation Greats. (Other movies such as Batman and Space Jam had been demonstrated earlier, but were not full versions available for sale.) The Warner Bros. U.S. launch followed on March 24, but was limited to seven cities.

[shevegen]

September 2000 ... mhhm more or less soon 5 years... half a decade ohhh man , it's got you!
:D