They might not have expected people to care so much about this. If enough people say something about it then we have a better chance of getting higher quality video. I'd pay about $10 or so extra for it but I'm not sure others would since it's so old and more than a little obscure.

Yeah, with the low amount of effort that was put into making the game more responsive and consistent (quickskip option for moving between rooms instead of having to click every time, icons indicating new scenes instead of having to check every room every time), I don't think I'd have spent ten dollars on it even if it had had better video quality.

Then again, they're selling it for just two bucks right away. Wouldn't it have been better to use the higher-quality version, put a 6 dollar price tag on it and sell it for 3 or 4 dollars on sales?

I'd probably have shelled out 3 or 4 dollars for this if it had been the higher quality version. That's 50% to 100% more than the two bucks that we all paid. Pretty big difference.

How much more would it cost them to cover the bandwidth used for the DVD version? It's nearly seven gigs.

If this was referring to my suggestion of course I only meant people who have a flat rate which would not lead to additional costs.

By "they" I meant the current holder of whatever copyrights this game belongs to, not GOG. It would be super weird for GOG to have managed to acquired the rights for something yet be unable to procure the actual content, be it from the people they bought the rights from or on their own given that they are releasing it. Is that a thing that can really happen? It seems absurd to me.

Hopefully they do get the better version sometime.

Regarding the potential bandwidth cost issues raised by the other poster, well... classic DVD encoding is awfully inefficient, there's no way it would take more than 2 gigs to have properly encoded files in this version of the game.

It really should be possible to get the higher-quality version.

For what is worth, I'm another one who would like the best video quality to be available for the game. Which seems to be the original DVD version -- or a decent compression of that files. And even better, a good quality compression of the original raw video files if Trilobyte still has them stored somewhere.

Yes, that really is happening - and it's not so rare. In example: most times GOG is aiming to get a product in as many languages as possible but sometimes the right holders however only have certain files left in their archive (esppecially with old titles this might happen) so GOG would be allowed to sell those other language versions as well but they cannot do it because of the missing files. Unfortunately (maybe GOG politics) GOG never stated openly in which cases they are missing the rights and in which cases they are just missing the files so the the community could help them here. Since I already contacted GOG in this case to offer them the German CD version and they were at least interested I can say for a fact that in this case they own the rights to the Garman version as well but obviously not the files. They would probably have published it otherwise. Of courset his is not the general case but I am glad that GOG even does accept those community offers if they are needed.

I do agree here. However I was assuming the other poster was referring to the bandwith costs for a potential community donor for of the original game (which would mean no recompressing) - but you might be correct as well and in that case, yes, newer compression methods would shring the movie files by a lot. Still not knowing for sure which version GOG and Steam is selling I searched through the Steam forums and found a post in which somebody was saying that the movie files in game are in fact from the DVD (he also mentioned the filenames and resolution which are typically for DVDs) but reencoded with a mew codec - hence the many artefacts. You can read the posting here.

Nothing is easy when it comes to old pc games ;)

OK guys, I did some tests with my german version and I succesfully converted some of the old vob files to webm. Great increase in quality. Now I need the englisch PC DVD version in order to do it for the whole game. Anyone interested in uploading it?

Nice job. Speaking of German versions... since the game does not only exist out of the movies though they are the biggest part of the game. DId you also manage to get the other German parts mixed into the GOG version or only the movies?

btw:Just in case you did ot realize (because of the actual missing notifications) I sent you a chatmessage.

I've just replied to your message. No, I haven't been able to translate the additional screens, yet. I'll see what I can do about it.

Ok, I've found a doable solution. I've attached a comparisson so you can see for yourself. Now I only need the english DVD iso ;)

I had to compress the image a little bit in order to meet gog's filesize limit.

I agree, the video quality of some Let's Play's on Youtube is much better than that of the GOG release. But also the quality of the separate audio files is quite bad, the ogg files are encoded with something around 80 kbps only and should be replaced too when a better version is available.

And when the DVD videos have a higher resolution maybe also the images need an update, as they are mostly in a resolution of 720x480 only.

Wow! This looks great. Very good!

Impressive ! I won't buy the GOG version until they add videos of similar quality.