Reality check! Commercial DVD/BD sales are going down - DVD/BD retail prices are getting ever lower. Streaming is going up very quickly and has been doing so for quite some time. Products like CyberLink's DVD provide an alternative to physical media as do so many forms of media renders like mp4 and players. Even Sony pulled out of their ultra expensive DVD creation software long ago (can't remember the name). From a recent look into this, there seems to be only one DVD/BD creation software company left catering to the professional sector - and its very expensive. Most of the rest seem to be aimed at the low cost domestic market - do a Google/Bing search re this.
Yes, I think that DVDA is great and I still use it for BD, but technology and popular usage of media has left it behind principally because physical media is no longer as popular as it used to be. Some 20 years ago, DVD made VHS and Beta obsolete, now DVD and BD is progressively being made obsolete by other technology.
@ Dexcon I assume you are referring to yes, the astronomically expensive Scenarist. There is, however, at least one companies offering a -uh, comparatively lower but still pricey, professional offering - DVDLogic (more buying options than you might guess; also offer UHD authoring capability; ranging from "costly" to "astronomically expensive"). Also of note it that Blu-Ray have extended format specs coming up with 4K Ultra HD (requiring requisite hardware to play and view of course). Whether this will be adopted widely enough remains to be seen; stats as of 2 years ago were encouraging with Hollywood releases of major stuff, e.g. Guardians. All of this is to say that Magix is wise bailing from this market segment. Having failed to keep up, the barrier to entry is prohibitive. The disc world may converge a la Spielberg's theatre world: the few, the most excellent, the expensive - a limited market for today's quick and dirty generation all of this aided and abetted by a certain virus! (or maybe the vinyl route?) or....
It was a shame that Magix kicked the AC3 format out of Vegas Pro. It's not available in Vegas Pro 18, and it was removed from my Vegas Pro 17 by update without any hint. So I had to reinstall my former version and freeze it without any updates in future.
Now I have read that the authoring tool has been removed, too. That's the next reason why Vegas Pro is no option any more in the future. What does the "Pro" stand for? More audio mastering with Sound Forge? No way ...
. . . . It was a shame that Magix kicked the AC3 format out of Vegas Pro . . . .
As @Marco. has pointed out the AC3 format has not been removed from any Magix video products, to be specific it is the Dolby Surround Sound support that has been removed - presumably a result of licencing conditions being imposed on users of the DSS encoder.
If you want to read more search the Internet for 'Dolby vs Adobe'.
It has been a long drawn out situation in regards to the licensing for AC-3. As John stated, we are not the only company that was forced to change our handling of this format and we actually hung on longer than others in the same situation. It was far from ideal and we know that. In the end, like other companies, we had no choice.