Older Premium DVD's are better?

[wanderer]

Digging through my various CD/DVD discs, and found the old Amiga Forever 2006 Video Edition.

Also have the newer Premium Edition 8 which contains a third, extra DVD ("DVD 0") with a newer Dave Haynie 2009 interview and Amiga software content. The other two purely video discs ("DVD 1" + "DVD 2") are identical in content, see here for the details. All great, essential stuff.

Being the curious person, I inserted the old DVDs and noticed they are dual-layered discs, over 7GB. This was surprising, since I had the image backups of the newer versions in front of me, and they were clearly single layer (around the usual 4GB mark). I checked the actual discs to confirm. Of course, the video bitrate of the content is significantly lower in the newer edition.

I'd understand if Cloanto wanted to cut down on costs but this seems a bit excessive. This is old, low-quality material (talking about video quality alone) and I didn't make a detailed, side-by-side comparison. Perhaps the drop in quality isn't noticeable, and perhaps no one cares.

But I do so there you go. If they wanted to cut down, a better way would be to make high-quality x264/x265 encodes of the MPEG-2 original material and put them all in one disc. A dual layer disc, mind you!

[damiraga]

Good to know. So, shrinkflation exists in Amiga market as well. Not surprising unfortunately, as I assume sales number of AF are not that high. I will check my version. Do not remember when it was purchased but it was quite some time ago. And one of the main reasons for the purchase was these DVDs. BTW, when was the Premium Edition 8 released? Just wondering when they switched to single layers.

[wanderer]

Originally Posted by damiraga

BTW, when was the Premium Edition 8 released?

Must have been circa 2018-2019.