In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long had been independently working to extract the H.264 video compression format from Apple's iPod firmware (1.2) through reverse engineering before meeting on the HandBrake forum. Since May–June 2006, no one in the HandBrake community was successful in contacting Petit, and no further code changes were officially made. Petit continued to be active on the HandBrake forum for a brief period after.
He continued to be the primary developer until April 2006, when the last official Subversion revision was committed. HandBrake was originally developed by Eric Petit in 2003 as software for BeOS, before porting it to other systems.
