What Happened to Codec Wiki?

Hi everyone, I know this was long overdue, but I owe all of you an explanation.

Around April to June 2026, Codec Wiki's old domain, wiki.x266.mov was suddenly unreachable, and worse, it threw an NXDOMAIN error (the queried domain name does not exist). Which several community members and readers noticed about.

Background

A year ago, I borrowed a family member's credit card to renew the domain because I was broke, but I forgot to uncheck the option to save the card. And when the time came, the domain registrar charged the card. Worse: I ignored it because I assumed said family member was familiar with the registrar's name. Fatal mistake.

They were immediately suspicious and requested the bank to revert the transaction and revoked the card. When the registrar received the dispute, they immediately suspended my account and all my domains, including x266.mov. I panicked and immediately contacted support on what happened. After further inquires, the support team said they cannot lift the suspension unless the dispute was canceled.

Fast forward and after countless back and forth with the bank's bureaucracy/registrar, and sending every necessary documents to both parties, it ultimately took too long and the window of opportunity to revert the dispute was closed, which was made even more difficult on the bank's side since the card itself was revoked. This entire saga went on for two months.

But there was a silver lining: the registrar was nice enough to lift the suspension thanks to my cooperation and offered to send a $40.81 invoice of the renewal + dispute fees, I agreed and the domain was eventually restored. But that doesn't discount the fact that the damage was already done.

Bottom line

I am sorry to everyone who was affected by the outage due to my gross negligence. It eroded trust in the wiki, destroyed the SEO, and left readers and outsiders in the dark, with some even blaming a fellow maintainer for the incident. And for all that, I sincerely apologize.

Moving Forward

The Codec Wiki's new domain, codecs.wiki, will be under a fellow community member's ownership who can manage the annual renewal fee with no issues. The old wiki.x266.mov domain redirects to the new domain indefinitely.

The wiki is now hosted on Cloudflare Pages instead of GitHub pages, analytics has been removed since the incident with no estimation on when it's returning.