This Company and their software

[AllNight]

When I try to hit their forum I get their forum's color scheme with the error message. So hopefully its just a site issue.

That's just due to browser storage / caching. If you try to go to their forum in a browser with cleared storage and cache (or a new browser install, you can check with a portable browser), you will get the same not found message as everything else, as their domain no longer resolves.

Given the amount of time everything has been down and no communication from anyone, this may not be just some maintenance issue, but some kind of takedown. Could be just the DNS, but it could also be that servers were seized. Even if no one was arrested, it would take some significant time and money to try to get the infrastructure back if the servers were seized. It's also possible that it could be some kind of exit scam thing, although that doesn't seem likely to me.

This was posted to reddit by Redfox1 (alan1476 on Reddit), a forum moderator:



Given how long everything has been offline now, it's not looking good.

[NewMelle]

RedFox1 lives in Sint Maarten according to his [now vanished] bio, so I always had the impression the whole setup was Caribbean-adjacent.

Cyberspace is global. I once worked on a project with people from Spain and Mexico.

[artsunlimited]

No idea. According to the WHOIS it was registered with Tucows which is in Canada.

RF1 is in the Netherland Antilles according to his [now vanished] bio, so I always had the impression the whole setup was Caribbean-adjacent.

[NewMelle]

Am I correct that .bz indicates it was located in Belize - as in physically? I thought they chose that location because they could sort of be under the radar, and I never thought of the government of Belize being that hostile takeover-y, but hey, live and learn.

No idea. According to the WHOIS it was registered with Tucows which is in Canada.

[slottedpig]

Arts I’m with you this is why once we get back in touch we should ask to setup some other form of comms just in case the site gets boned we can see what’s up. Almost every other community I’m a part of has this and AS is a phenomenal community to be a part of, the devs are simply the best in the biz. I’m think cyber attack is also a very likely situation especially with the way things are going down now world wide.

[artsunlimited]

The feds like to put up their own banner when they seize a site, like a dog pissing on a tree. I got my AS license just 6 days ago. Inconvenient, but I'm more hopeful about AS than SF. It's been over 4 months for SF, less than 24 hours for AS. I get the sense that they are a more competent crew. Maybe a cyber attack that required them to take everything down to clean it and restore from offline backups?

OMG that's too funny! And terrible timing for your purchase, let's hope you can laugh about it by next week! I'm thinking that whatever occurred wasn't planned, so hopefully they can recover from it so we can both return to what makes life worth living.

[JeffDavis]

I had AS running overnight (not downloading, just the program up and running). When I tried to download a movie in the morning, it responded, completed the search and showed the available options (codecs, resolutions, etc.). When I clicked download, it responded normally except no bytes were being transferred, it was waiting. I closed the program and tried to restart it, but got the "cannot access the internet" message. Since my web browser was working, I concluded it meant that it could not access the AS server.

[slottedpig]

Arts I’m with you this is why once we get back in touch we should ask to setup some other form of comma just in case the site gets boned we can see what’s up. Almost every other community I’m a part of has this and AS is a phenomenal community to be a part of, the devs are simply the best in the biz. I’m think cyber attack is also a very likely situation especially with the way things are going down now world wide.

[artsunlimited]

They could be switching hosts as well which is why they updated their domain. It’s in their best financial interest to continue on regardless of what’s going on.

Yeah, but wouldn't they tell people beforehand? It's definitely to their financial benefit to keep going, especially with the change in licensing in January to only 1-2 years (devs don't work cheap, so lifetime licenses probably were costing them more than they could afford).

[JeffDavis]

The feds like to put up their own banner when they seize a site, like a dog pissing on a tree. I got my AS license just 6 days ago. Inconvenient, but I'm more hopeful about AS than SF. It's been over 4 months for SF, less than 24 hours for AS. I get the sense that they are a more competent crew. Maybe a cyber attack that required them to take everything down to clean it and restore from offline backups?

[NewMelle]

I got the same results. There is no longer an IP for the domain name. Or at least no DNS record.

https://www.whois.com/whois/redfox.bz

[artsunlimited]

Their domain was just updated today, although it was locked from being updated or transferred. Either they made a change to it or a government agency took it over. The domain doesn't expire until next year, and so there was no reason for them to make a change. Keep an eye on https://torrentfreak.com/ as they cover such things as government takeovers.

Yeah, the creation date was the day after that forum convo where they got a lot of support from everyone to regroup and make the software available (I don't have a phenomenal memory, it's still open on my browser because I was taking a stroll down memory lane and reading it last night.) Am I correct that .bz indicates it was located in Belize - as in physically? I thought they chose that location because they could sort of be under the radar, and I never thought of the government of Belize being that hostile takeover-y, but hey, live and learn.

[artsunlimited]

Any chance you can share what settings you use? I usually end up with files that are way bigger then they need to be or too low of a bit rate that the picture quality suffers.

Oh, sure - let me know if these aren't what you're looking for.

I record a TS file at 8.2 Mbps constant rate, which for a full two-hour recording gives me around 8GB file/9210 kbps total bitrate. Audio bitrate is 640kbps A52/AC3, either stereo or 6 channel, depending if I'm ripping from my Firestick or my Comcast DVR, respectively.
But because I then convert it to mp4 using Wondershare Uniconverter - to crop or enhance it, or edit out commercials, or splice it to remove "next episode" notices, whatever - that drops the file size to 6.38GB (average mp4 direct download) 8441kbps total bitrate, and the audio to 320kbps AAC, either 6-channel or stereo. If I rip using mp4 rather than TS (which is the setting Hauppage recommends), the audio is only 64kbps, so forget that. The only thing I ever fooled around with much was the audio bitrate, which defaults to either 128 or 192kbps, I forget which, so I'm sure you and other tech whizzes on this forum can probably see a lot better ways to get much better results.

[slottedpig]

They could be switching hosts as well which is why they updated their domain. It’s in their best financial interest to continue on regardless of what’s going on.

[Cats4U]

Their domain was just updated today, although it was locked from being updated or transferred. Either they made a change to it or a government agency took it over. The domain doesn't expire until next year, and so there was no reason for them to make a change. Keep an eye on https://torrentfreak.com/ as they cover such things as government takeovers.