Seamless branching is a mechanism used on

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

s and Blu-ray Discs to allow the player to jump to a different scene after finishing one. The most common purpose is to have several versions of a scene within one film, without having to store the entire film on the disc several times. A popular example is the Platinum Edition DVD of ''

The Lion King ''The Lion King'' is a 1994 American animated musical drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 32nd Disney animated feature film and the fifth produced during the Disney Renaissance ...

'', where the user can select between the original theatrical version and an extended version. The two versions differ only in one scene (the "morning report"). The DVD player is instructed to play the film normally up to this scene, then jump to the appropriate scene as selected by the user before the commencement of the film, and then jump back to play the rest of the film. The user normally does not notice this jump, hence the word ''seamless''. Larger scale examples of the same technique are seen in the 2000 Ultimate Edition DVD of '' Terminator 2: Judgment Day'', the 2007 DVD rerelease of ''

Blade Runner ''Blade Runner'' is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, and written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick' ...

'' and the Platinum and Diamond Edition DVDs of ''

Beauty and the Beast ''Beauty and the Beast'' (french: La Belle et la Bête) is a fairy tale written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in ''La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins'' (''The Young American and Marine ...

'' in which three different cuts of the films are playable from the same discs. Another possible use of seamless branching is for the localisation (translation) of on-screen visible text. The '' Star Wars'' DVDs with their

opening crawl The ''Star Wars'' opening crawl is a signature device of the opening sequences of every numbered film of the '' Star Wars'' series, an American epic space opera franchise created by George Lucas. Within a black sky background featuring a smatt ...

are a prime example. Normally, only the audio track of films is translated into other languages, but when text central to the plot is visible on-screen, the scene may be created once for every language, and the DVD player can be instructed to select the appropriate version of the scene depending on the user's language preference. However, for this purpose a technique called multi-angle is used more often.

See also