First off, let me say I hope that everyone is staying safe, and sane, in these unusual times. Between the coronavirus and the recent protests and unrest, we know that the law enforcement community is facing many unique challenges, so from the bottom of our hearts here at DME Forensics, thank you!
For those of you working on investigations related to protest and riots, surveillance video can be a great tool and resource for your investigation, however the damage caused by looting and fire can add additional challenges. Please reach out to us if you need any additional support with new filesystems or getting partially damaged drives working. We are already seeing an increase in requests for support of additional new DVR systems, as well as indications of damaged drives. To that end, we have adjusted the focus of our team to respond to these inquiries as quickly as possible.
We are still operating ‘business as unusual’ here at DME under Colorado’s ‘Safer at Home’ plan and while the coronavirus has certainly disrupted our day to day lives, it has not slowed us down. In fact, this June marks a huge milestone for us and DVR Examiner.
DVR Examiner is 6 years old! Well, technically a little older if you count the proof of concept, but we don’t have a date for that, so we’re calling it 6 years as of version 1.0. Here is the oldest “baby photo” we could find – it predates my arrival and didn’t even have a name at that point.
Continuing to flip through the photo album, we see that our design was much improved when we released 1.0.
Then, DVR Examiner got a much-needed face-lift and enhanced feature set when 2.0 came around. DVR Examiner was about 3 years old at that point, so I’m not sure what type of twisted people we are giving face-lifts to a 3-year-old. The things we do for our users!
Overall, since the release of DVR Examiner 1.0, we have published just under 100 updates between main application releases and filesystem database updates. This has brought our supported filesystem count from the initial 12 we supported in 1.0 to over 127 in the latest FDU. Many of these filesystems have also been revisited to add additional capabilities like inaccessible recovery, support for H.265, and additional variations of the original filesystem. It has been quite a journey over the last 6 years and while we know DVR Examiner isn’t quite like a great bottle of wine or whiskey, we hope you agree that DVR Examiner has been getting better with age.
Outside of DVR Examiner, our team has changed as well. A few years ago, we relocated from Virginia to Golden, Colorado. Our team has grown from just 3 to 17 people. We hope you’ve enjoyed meeting our team the last few weeks with our “Meat the Team” blog posts. We’re not done yet – we are actively hiring and looking to grow the team even more to support you.
We are also tremendously proud and humbled that over 1,000 agencies in more than 85 countries have put their faith and trust in DME Forensics and DVR Examiner. The entire team values your support and works hard to make sure we continue to provide solutions you can count on.
With DVR Examiner turning 6 years old, we had been trying to decide what to do to celebrate. Somewhere along the line in our discussions, “celebrate” turned into “let’s do a lot more work”, and the result of that discussion was:
Obviously, the “let’s do a lot more work” part did not extend to coming up with a new, flashy, or creative name for the update, but we think you’ll appreciate us spending that time on the update itself.
While some of our team has been working on 3.0 for a few months now and has made tremendous progress, we can’t give you an exact release date at this point. However, we are now moving most of the rest of the team over to 3.0, and we are aiming to have it ready for release later this year. For everyone that is currently using 2.9: don’t worry, we are continuing to add new filesystems and fix issues as they arise. The team just released an FDU, and we have more on the roadmap before 3.0 is ready.
We have some really great big things in store for 3.0 and we will be sharing them with you as development continues, so be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date with the latest news!