On Thursday 16 January 2014 00:14:19 Jon Elson did opine: > On 01/15/2014 08:17 PM, Charles Steinkuehler wrote: > > On 1/15/2014 8:29 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > >> On 01/15/2014 12:08 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > >>>> Jon > >>> > >>> Videolan was yours? I bow in respect, that was great! > >> > >> No, no no! VideoLan put my inferior product out of business! > > > > Since we're sharing video production war stories, I did the analog > > hardware design and PCB layout for an Amiga product called the Video > > Toaster back in the day (late 1980's). > > Wow, I had no idea! I am pretty sure that more than half of > my animation controllers were used with Video Toasters. > > Jon
And the rest were probably used with an A/B roll editor, by Ring Video Systems. But they committed ritual suicide, Japanese style, by dongle protecting their software, with the top carved off the dongle so no one could decipher what it was. Hidden in a parport pass thru, the things had the lifetime of a bowl of peanut M&M's. They didn't care when the dongle died, and took about 6 weeks of legal proofs we owned the software every time. Putting a tv stations production department on a 6 week vacation every 6 months was, shall we say, less than impressive to us as it was a direct valve on at least 2 of the 4 teats on our cash cow. When the 3rd one expired, they screwed around even longer and I finally told them I would have a new, working dongle in the morning or I would have it hacked and published on the underground, just barely not demolishing the phone when I hung it up. Fedex came and went about 10 am the next morning, no dongle. I called them, with smoke coming out of both ears. He claimed he had gotten in his car, and driven about 200 miles one way to the author of the SW who had the last existing dongle only to find his had died too. I told them to recompile without that and send me a copy. 4 days and 4 new copies all crashed when we loaded it. We packed the original up in a tarball and mailed it to a real amiga guru in Germany who should probably remain nameless. He emailed it back the next morning but missed one of its checks. Having taken out 3 of them, he went back in and found the last one since by then he knew what he was looking for, and sent us back a clean copy about 3 hours later. But by then we were figuring out both how to keep production going, and that the 3 machines we had bought to use with it were about worn out too, so it gradually fell into disuse over the next 6 months or so. By then I had no clue how many pie-rat copies of their $25000 software were out there, or how many more videolans that sold for you, a bunch I hope. How many copies of their SW was not my concern, we had paid rather exorbitantly for the one setup we were using & didn't feel I owed them a thing except some time in the federal slammer for not having any support for a product less than the federally mandated 5 years. RVS, Ring Video Systems, apparently faded into the Florida sands, deservedly so for those of us who remember the bullshit we got from them quite clearly. Yeah, another war story from the video trenches. One that did not end well for them. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> QOTD: "It seems to me that your antenna doesn't bring in too many stations anymore." A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
