I know that Lionsgate are gulity of this, on at least several releases, most notably Young Guns and The Descent where the initial releases were encoded with the MPEG-2 codec, and then later reissued with an updated MPEG-4 codec. The MPEG-2 versions are apparently still in retail circulation also, so it's hard to tell which one you'll get, except for very subtle visual differences in the packaging and spine art.

They've done some screen comparisons of The Descent Blu-ray's on another forum (I've lost the link) and there are noticable visual differences between the codecs. The Young Guns release that uses the MPEG-4 codec actually looks pretty decent, in contrast to the early reviews for the original MPEG-2 release which commented on the poor transfer.

I think I've also found Sony doing this with the Vertical Limit Blu-ray. This was released in 2007, and every review I've seen states the disc uses an MPEG-2 codec. However, it appears that a newer version of the disc is out that uses an MPEG-4 codec with the disc's authoring date in 2008.

Does anyone know of any other examples of this done by studios?

I know they reissued The Fifth Element but that was anything but silent and was due to complaints about the transfer quality.

If you have one of these MPEG-2 releases and they did a reissue with basically just changing the disc in the existing version they probably have a replacement program where you can contact them and get the newer disc, at least it'd be worth checking into.

-Agrare

What a terrible thing to do for one's public relations.

I'm glad I went with the Australian release of The Descent (had read at the time it was the best available... and it's the most convenient to get hold of).