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Bit of a random question, but I've noticed something while ripping my Blu-Ray collection. Oftentimes, I'll see two seemingly identical .mpls choices on the list; one has some variety of audio/subtitle languages (e.g., English, Spanish, French, German, etc.), and the other, without fail, has only English and Japanese. Does anyone know what the reason for this is? And if there's any substantive differences between the two I should be aware of? I always opt for the non-English/Japanese option when I encounter this but perhaps I'm mistaken (or perhaps it doesn't matter at all).

Not necessarily random.

GKIDS disks have this sometimes. I first saw it when I got A Letter to Momo and When Marnie was Here, but other disks in the Studio Ghibli collection have had it to.

It makes it a bit of a pain to make a dual-language file, because the play lists give you EITHER English language and minimal subtitles, or Japanese and full subtitles. It takes a bit of manipulating to get both.

For the record, these are not Japanese films, per se - I'm talking about your average big studio American film on Blu-Ray

I've seen this as well on lots of Blu-rays. For example, the Friends Blu-rays have each and every episode on two playlists, one in English plus a bunch of European languages, the other in English and Japanese. But there are many others that do this. I assume there must be some advantage to doing it this way, and I'm very curious as to what it might be.

Probably some form of regional coding, i.e. they simply took the formats they had and put them on the disc. I've seen various examples with lots of European subs excluding German so we got to wait and pay extra when they're finally released.