DVD hypercommentary

Many DVD's today have a director's/actor's commentary track. Such tracks can often provide interesting bits of trivia and information which can enhance a person's understanding and enjoyment of a film. Unfortunately, the amount of stuff the director has to say about a scene or shot rarely fits with the duration of the scene or shot itself, so there will be times when the director either finishes talking about an interesting shot long after the shot has finished or has to cut short his discussion to keep up with the movie, while there will be other times when the director doesn't really have anything interesting to say about what's on screen at the time and will talk about other things which, while interesting, don't have much to do with what's on-screen at the time.

One DVD which manages to avoid this problem to some extent is _Ben Hur_. There, if one opts to watch the movie with commentary, the chapter stops will be moved to the parts of the movie that Charlton Heston comments upon and one can simply watch those while skipping the parts he has nothing to say. This is a considerable improvement over most DVD's, but I'd suggest still another approach.

I'd have a number of interesting 'comment points' (there could be anywhere a few dozen to a hundred or so, depending upon the movie and what the director/actors/whomever have to say). If the movie was watched in "comment point" mode, then any time the director or whomever wanted to say something about a particular scene, a "comment" icon would appear (either in an alternate "angle" track or "subtitle" track). Pressing enter at that point would suspend the movie and play the commentary for that scene, accompanied by either a still or by visuals which would help the commentary (e.g. if the director was commenting about something visible in frame, the DVD could show a close-up of the item of interest). Once the commentary was done, the movie would resume from where it was interrupted.

For people who were more interested in the commendaries than in watching the movie again, the individual commentaries could be selected via menu, or a user could opt to play all the commentaries without the movie.

There shouldn't be any difficulty implementing something like this; I have a disk which does something similar (it a program about Melies, along with 15 of his shorts; during the discussion of certain shorts, an icon will appear on screen; pressing enter at that time will show the short and then resume the picture). Technically almost exactly what I'm describing, but for a different purpose.