any particular reason for this

[Minion]

something i've noticed in anime movie VOB files for awile now. just curious if theres any reason why they do this. they don't do it so much with serries, but i see this alot in feature length anime.

the first VOB will have track 1 as english. every track after that will have japanese for track one, and english is track 2.

occasionally it's an anoyance when i set up a playlist of VOB files from a movie in VLC, and it all of a sudden starts speaking in japanese when it gets to the second VOB.
for the sake of example, this happens in appleseed.

nothing terribly important. just wanna know why they set it up like this

[Zero1]

I'm a little rusty with MPEG-2, so what I will tell you is more or less based on how menus and stuff work in MP4 (but for the purpose of this they are the same).

Basically you can store audio tracks in one order (which simply seems to be that they muxed Japanese first), but in the menu/systems (BIFS in MP4) you can specify which track gets played by default, in this case English is default. It sounds as though the first VOB has said information in it, or access to it (well something along those lines, I'm speculating here), so despite the Japanese track being logically first, that is ignored and English is played as the default. On the other hand it sounds like the other VOBs don't have this information, and so they can only play back whatever is the first muxed since it doesn't have knowledge of any preferred orders.

That's one theory; another could simply be whack mastering. You will notice that VOBs are split in 1GB chunks; it could be that they have their audio and video already split up to the correct sizes, but someone was inconsistant muxing them, for example they added the English track first on the first VOB and Japanese on the rest of them, but I think you would experience problems during actual playback, like the audio language changing midway through the film where it only knows to play track 1 (track 1 in VOB 1 is English, track 1 in VOB 2 is Japanese). However that is a bit of a shot in the dark.

Who knows what goes on with DVDs sometimes, I've seen some pretty shocking things. Perhaps someone with MPEG-2 systems could throw some light on the matter.

[BasharOfTheAges]

I know from experience in running video rooms at AAC, certain (cheaper) DVD players will run certain branded DVDs differently. I think it was the Funimation discs that we had that would switch back to the English track after every episode of a series. It was only one company's discs that would do it, but it was annoying as hell.