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This article is from the DVD Formats FAQ, by jtfrog@usa.net (Jim Taylor) with numerous contributions by others.

1.42 How do the parental control and multi-rating features work?

DVD includes parental management features for blocking playback and for
multiple versions of a movie on a single disc. Players (including software
players on PCs) can be set to a parental level so that discs rated above
that level will not play. As an alternative to a single rating for the
entire disc (or ratings for different sections of the disc), a disc can be
designed so that it plays a different version of the movie depending on the
parental level that has been set in the player. By taking advantage of the
seamless branching feature of DVD, objectionable scenes are automatically
skipped over or replaced during playback. This requires that the disc be
carefully authored with alternate scenes and branch points that don't cause
interruptions or discontinuities in the soundtrack. There is no standard
way to identify which discs have multi-rated content.

Unfortunately, very few multi-rating discs have been produced. Hollywood
studios are not convinced that there is a big enough demand to justify the
extra work involved (shooting extra footage, recording extra audio, editing
new sequences, creating branch points, synchronizing the soundtrack across
jumps, submitting new versions for MPAA rating, dealing with players that
don't properly implement parental branching, having video store chains
refuse to carry discs with unrated content, and much more). If this feature
is important to you, let the studios know. A list of studio addresses is
available at DVD File.

Multi-ratings discs include Kalifornia, Crash, Damage, Embrace of the
Vampire, Poison Ivy, Species II. Discs that use multi-story branching (not
always seamless) for a director's cut or special edition version include
Dark Star, Stargate (1999 release), The Abyss, Independence Day, Terminator
2 (2000 release).

Another option is to use a software player on a computer that can read a
"play list" telling it where to skip scenes or mute the audio, This allows
play lists to be created for the thousands of DVD movies that were produced
without parental control features. A number of projects are underway to
develop this type of software, but nothing is available yet.

Yet another option is TVGuardian, a device that attaches between the DVD
player and the TV to filter out profanity and vulgar language. The box
reads the closed caption text and automatically mutes the audio and
provides substitute captions for objectionable words.

 

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