Heads you lose, tails you lose

“I can’t recall other warring adversaries deliberately making life more difficult for their own customers to score a cheap point,” wrote Barry Collins in his column for issue 281 ( see p25) on the tit-for-tat between Google and Amazon.

The situation isn’t exactly the same, but Adobe used to pay a license fee to Dolby to include its codec in Premiere Pro CC, which is missing

Many people will now have silent video files, as the AC3 Dolby audio is ignored by Adobe Premiere Pro

from the 2018 version. By default, updating to a new version uninstalls the old version, and it was easy to do that without being warned of the consequence.

I suspect Adobe stopped licensing Dolby because Windows 10 decodes it natively, and Adobe and Dolby couldn’t agree on a reasonable license fee for a codec that is now required by fewer users. Many people are still using Windows 7, often in corporate environments where the individual user can’t upgrade, or have older machines with lots of peripherals that might not have drivers for Windows 10. As a result, they’ll now have silent video files, as the AC3 Dolby audio is ignored by Premiere Pro and doesn’t show up on the timeline.

I’ve taken to editing on my Windows 10 laptop, which isn’t ideal because lots of other resource files are on my desktop. Another option would be to convert the files to a format that Premiere Pro can still deal with, but you either convert to a compressed format, which loses some quality, or an uncompressed format that takes up more space. Either way, it’s timeconsuming and inconvenient.

So, not quite the same as Amazon versus Google but an example of two companies disagreeing and the customer losing out. Steve Smith