The squabble between Adobe and Dolby is pretty unfortunate. Thanks to the dispute the encoders for Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus formats were removed from Adobe's audio-video applications that could encode 5.1 or 7.1 surround audio. Now anyone creating a video project with surround sound using Premiere Pro will have to buy a third party plug-in (or use a different application) to encode surround mixes in Dolby formats.
Minnetonka audio has a SurCode plug-in for Premiere Pro. It costs $295 and doesn't support 7.1. It just does mono, stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital encoding. The same goes for the SurCode DTS DVD standalone application (there is a $99 DTS music CD encoding application). There are other applications and plug-ins for rival applications (like Avid, ProTools, etc). But the costs go up from there. Most Blu-ray discs have their audio encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio format. The current DTS:X Encoder Suite (which encodes next-gen DTS:X audio up to 11.1 and older DTS-HD audio up to 7.1) costs $1495. That's not bad if your main business is video production. But it's a bit much if you're only making short audio-video projects from time to time. Dolby has encoding products for TrueHD and Atmos formats that are much more expensive (and MacOSX only).
Windows 10 has built-in capabilities to decode Dolby Digital audio. That's fine for playback. It doesn't get you anywhere if you have a surround mix and want to encode it in Dolby Digital. Straight PCM 5.1/7.1 audio is an alternative, but that format doesn't have "fold down" 5.1>2.0 capabilities like Dolby Digital. And the audio bitstream is much bigger.
WildWestDesigns said:
One word of caution with this, is that Adobe could take the servers offline and then couldn't activate them again once the computer you have them on goes kaput. I wouldn't be surprised with that.
Adobe has been retiring activation servers for older versions of Creative Suite. The CS2 servers were retired in 2013. The CS3 servers were shut down in 2016. It would be reasonable to assume the CS4, CS5 and CS6 servers will be eventually retired too.
In the case of CS2, Adobe provided a new set of installers to registered users. Those installers didn't require activation. I think Adobe has a different procedure for people with registered copies of CS3. I've seen users have installations headaches with later CS versions due to them being upgrades from previous versions: serial numbers for both the previous version and upgrade version have to check out with the servers. That doesn't always happen.
I still have my old CS 5.5 Master Collection box handy as a worst case scenario fallback. I've kept a lot of other previous version discs from Adobe, Corel, Macromedia, etc just for the sentimental value. I even have my original boxes of Photoshop 2.5 and Illustrator 4 with the floppy disc installers.