In the days of DVDs, things were little more consistent. Assuming a US film, on a typical US DVD you would find DD5.1 English, DD French and/or Spanish along with English, Frencg and/or Spanish subtitles. Now that we have Blu-ray and HD DVD with far greater capacity and bandwidth, there seem to be far greater variablity and peculiarity with the included audio languages and subtitles.

We've complained about the curious lack of Spanish subtitles on Universal HD DVDs (and lack of subtitles on HD DVD in general given one of the advantage of the format is lack of region coding), but I am curious as to why certain languages are included in many Blu-ray titles.

For example, Memoirs of a Geisha Blu-ray from Sony contains English PCM, English DD, French DD, and Thai DD. Why Thai? Is there even a Blu-ray market in Thai? Another is Underworld from Sony. This contains English PCM, Italian PCM, English DD, French DD, and Italian DD. It also contains English, French, and Italian subtitles. So why is Italian included as a PCM? Will this be also sold in Italy, and is that why Italian is in PCM, DD, and subtitle, but no Spanish of any kind?

Finally, Replacement Killers Blu-ray also from Sony. It contains English PCM, Italian PCM, English DD, French DD, Italian DD, and Hungarian DD track. Is there a big Hungarian presence in Blu-ray and why another Italian PCM track? For subtitles, this release has a total of 27 subtitles.
* English SDH
* Slovene Subtitles
* Turkish Subtitles
* Czech Subtitles
* Swedish Subtitles
* Dutch Subtitles
* Icelandic Subtitles
* Greek Subtitles
* Bulgarian Subtitles
* Spanish Subtitles
* Crotian Subtitles
* Polish Subtitles
* Thai Subtitles
* Hungarian Subtitles
* Chinese Subtitles
* Italian Subtitles
* French Subtitles
* Hindi Subtitles
* Arabic Subtitles
* Danish Subtitles
* Romanian Subtitles
* Finnish Subtitles
* Portuguese Subtitles
* Hebrew Subtitles
* English Subtitles
* Norwegian Subtitles
For the life of me, I can't figure out why certain languages are included, and others excluded.

i wonder too how the non-english pcm audio is chosen. seems odd to dedicate so much space to a dubbed language not spoken widely in the world. spanish and french we know is to cater to the spanish and french speaking communities in u.s. and canada.