Multiple Seemingly Identical Angles

[CarlEdman]

A small, but non-trivial number of my DVDs (e.g., my Shrek Widescreen DVD version) have the main movie in multiple angles which can be extracted. However, even after extensive comparisons between the angles, I just cannot detect any differences, though there must be some as the extracted files are not identical and typically vary by a fraction of a percent in size.

I seem to recall mention that this feature has been used to seamlessly multi-lingualize on-screen text and end credits. That would be a neat application and explain the multiple nearly-identical angles. You'd in effect get fully localized versions of a movie while preserving the bit-rate in the vast majority of the material in which the image contains no text.

Thing is, I've never seen that on any of the multi-angle main-stream DVDs in my library that I have transferred. Instead they look totally identical and I'm unsure what to pick.

Any ideas about what might be going on? Or where I should check for differences? I realize that I probably could build an avisynth script that imports two angles, subtracts them, and then fast-forward to see the difference, and that is probably my next step, if nobody here knows what is going on.

[Stereodude]

Generally animated movies have different languages in the animation, so for example the language on a sign will be different if you're watching the Spanish version vs. English version vs. French version. Sometimes the opening titles are different as well.

[CarlEdman]

@stereodude Yes, I think I mentioned that I had heard about that in my original post and thought it was a neat idea, but that I've never seen it actually done.

[Stereodude]

@stereodude Yes, I think I mentioned that I had heard about that in my original post and thought it was a neat idea, but that I've never seen it actually done.It's done on Blu-Ray's quite often. I've seen it on a few DVDs over the years.