Just want to start off by saying; Subscription based software/apps are a ripoff and scam!!
And .wmv doesn’t work with Video A.I. 4, when ver. 3 did. Please Fix!
After a long time of researching competitors, and debating whether or not… This will be the 1st, and [last] time I ever spend this much for a piece of software! Hopefully a better alternative will come alone soon… FREE or Cheaper!
When you pay the $300 you can use it effectively for life - you just don’t get further upgrades beyond the first year. The $300 might have been very steep for me as well but that has nothing to do with my perceived value of it which I would call an absolute bargain by any standards. If I had the capacity to do so I would happily have paid $3,000 for it, but of course if they did ask that much it would have been far beyond my ability to pay.
Keep in mind you are paying a company that has provided a top-drawer product that is far and beyond the best of its kind in the world. That sort of product does not come cheaply, nor will it ever come cheaply and nor should it.
Some decades ago someone claimed that no computer would need more than 640 K of RAM. Never. Ever. 
I stand by what I wrote because it is state of the art and you must always pay a premium for state of the art. If you want to wait another 50 years till this sort of technology is in a $100 media player (and that $100 media player has 6 times the processing power of a bank of four current generation RTX4090 Nvidia cards as of today apart from licencing the “Topaz RealTime Chip”), be my guest. By then state of the art will have moved well and truly on, as it always does.
1st of all it is not a ripoff, it is a common sales model accepted in the industry, especially in the professional software market which Topaz is at.
2nd of all, it is not a subscription based software. you have one CAPEX for the software and then additional optional OPEX for Upgrade protection every year (with subscription based software, everything is OPEX and must be paid to use the software). or in the professional market “maintenance” (fee). but the difference between professional market and this one, on Professional / enterprise software you usually don’t get support if you don’t pay the maintenance fee. with Topaz you can use it and you get support.
your maintenance fee is only “upgrade protection” fee…
While eager to add unneeded features, they are slow to respond to bugs in existing features and are notably unsatisfied as a subspliction.
Because of the slow bug response, it does not make much sense to say that one can continue to use the old version.
For example, it took two years to go from Proteus 3 to Proteus 4.
The color changes and black stains that occurred in Proteus 3 were left unaddressed for two years, and people whose subscriptions expired continue to use Proteus 3 with bugs?
That would be strange.
The fact that it is commonly used by software companies doesn’t mean that it is not a ripoff. In fact, in most cases, it really IS - at least as long as there’s no one-time buying option.
(This isn’t true of course for something that includes remote work or server space and the like)
But then, as you correctly stated, Topaz software is NOT subscription, so this whole discussion is kinda moot.
I remember I paid $700 for my first 10Meg MicroScience Harddrive in the 1980s and used it to fix a county’s billing address file for all their tax/garbage collection… because their then IT dept. couldn’t do it, and the post office wouldn’t deliver their bills to the old Zip codes… 
@ertyu99 @jo.vo
That is a matter of prospective. you might believe it’s a ripoff, others believe it’s a business model to be able and cover continuous R&D expense.
Sales of one time payment by itself (unless it is a very popular program that everyone buys) usually can’t cover continuous heavy R&D expense and operations.
VAI as we all know, is a very sophisticated program that requires many man months of R&D constantly to enhance it’s capabilities.
It is not a simple tool or a one time development effort program, like a download manager tool or a Computer Game that doesn’t require much R&D attention after release (only bug fixes, which is already under managed services, not R&D). Those type of software could get away with a one time fee as all their expense (or the majority of it) was developing the software before release. once it was released, not much development is involved.
With VAI they all the time enhance it’s capabilities, that cost money and a lot of it.
Someone needs to cover those expenses or the company would no longer be profitable and would be forced to shut down.
I don’t know how much is your knowledge in business and P&L, but I can guarantee you that if you were exposed to the annual expense figures of Topaz with the Annual revenue from one time sale itself, I am convinced you would agree with Topaz current sales model and it would make total sense to you and you would agree with it.
You must not look at it only from a consumer point of view, you need to look at the bigger picture here.
if you only follow the consumer point of view (and let’s say they follow it as well) you would end up reading an announcement post at Topaz forum, under the “General” section, braking the news that they are shutting down their business. and it would be much quicker then you think.
I still think it helps me mentally to think of it as a ‘Kickstarter’ program—but you get to use it while it’s being built. Instead of like all the Kickstarter projects that take your money and deliver something much less than what they advertised three years later.
There are plenty of (top-notch) Free a.i. programs out there that serve different purposes. Whether it be speech, photos, or face swapping; they do an awesome job. So it’s only a matter of time until a (Free or Cheaper) good alternative for video upscaling comes alone… Hopefully before my 1 year is up!
You came out of your own pocket to help others. Much respect! 
I never said Topaz was subscription based. 
well, you didn’t put a context in your opening statement, so it was well understood by the common reader that you mean the piece of software where you post on their software support forum
Why did you buy it then? Didn’t you comprehend the details?
I am an interested user, specifically for upscaling 480i to 1080p or 4k.
I currently own the DVD Fab AI Upscaler, which is unusable junk.
My concern is seeing the $299 price tag, and the endless number of version releases and bug fixes.
There is further concern about having to purchase further bug fixes after the 1 year expiration.
Question: is there a stable release specifically for upscaling 480i?
I don’t need all the bells and whistles and extra features.
Just the above function, but accurate and stable.
Topaz Video AI is the best software for AI upscaling period…and to my knowledge is the only AI software that let’s you perform upscaling completely locally (no cloud processing, which is important to some).
Also, there are plenty of times throughout the year where you can purchase the software at a significant discount (Black Friday for example).
If you download the trial version and you can get it to work how you want, then you will be as confident as you can get that this is what you want to buy. If it’s working for you, you don’t have to update it ever. It will continue to work for you in the exact same way.
The problems start when you want some feature that doesn’t exist, or if you’ve got some bug on your system that not many other people have. During the trial period, really try to put it through what you would do with it as if you had bought it.
I will try the latest once again.
I first tried v3.x on a huge Xeon machine, and found it terrible slow, and marginal results.
It will be interesting to compare the Topaz upscaled digital file with the upscaled image from my Panasonic 4k player.
This BD player seems to do better upscaling than my U8H TV does with the same source.
Topaz is more depended on a good GPU, not so much on the CPU. that is probably why you getting poor performance.
