Vee-Hive: A Brief History

Vee-Hive is a personal project that began more than fifteen years ago when I had an urgent need to salvage increasingly grainy footage from a large library of boxing matches held on VHS tapes. Over a couple of months, I threw together a program that was fit-for-purpose, if a little rough around the edges, and with a startling lack of imagination, called it Videophile; well, it was for managing my video files! Back then, only a handful of people used the program as it wasn't publicly available but, from the very beginning, it supported tagging and the creation of segments. Using those early features, I and a few friends spent many hours happily (and easily) finding exciting moments from big fights and creating montages of footage of our favourite pugilists in action. My love for the noble art having waned, Videophile was neglected for a number of years (about eight, in fact) until, out of a growing fondness for golf, my passion for the project re-ignited as I slowly acquired more and more footage of the greatest golf swings the game had seen. With that, of course, came the need to quickly and easily locate files and parts of files so I turned, once more, to my old and trusted program. However, finding it somewhat lacking in certain areas, I was soon dusting off my development environment and making changes: Videophile II was born. Still rather crude in appearance, and having several bugs that I, personally, could live with, I decided to share my work with the world, reasoning that there would be many others who may wish to enjoy its functionality and, perhaps, help to shape its evolution. Many thousands of downloads later, and with nearly as many (OK, more!) bugs eradicated and kinks ironed out, I decided that my orignal name was far too passé and that I wanted something with a bit more snap; the name V-Hive was suggested by a user and slightly elongated by me to Vee-Hive... During this journey, I like to think that the program has matured quite nicely and is now feature-rich, thanks in part to feedback from users. Nowadays, there are quite a few applications within Vee-Hive's peer-group, some of which are extravagantly expensive without having anything like the same power or flexibility so, all-in-all, I'm rather proud of my little offering...