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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting for some clever chap to cut the opening out as well. The dream would be to have one version of the opening and a mencoder script to put the pieces back together. It would shave a few dozens megabytes on each file off.

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People won't do this for GoT in particular as the opening changes episode to episode and gives you a preview into the locations that that episode will deal with. A lot of people enjoy the openings and pay attention to them.

I liken it to the Simpsons or Futurama in the sense that things subtly change (e.g. locations which are destroyed in the show, are destroyed in the opening, and such).

Indeed. Not only this, but the opening credits also gives the names of the actors (which change from one episode to the next), director, writer etc. of the episode, which are unique to each episode.

I was not talking about Game of Thrones in particular though.

This is quite widely done for anime. The opening credits are actually different episode to episode for Game of Thrones both in people and the animation.

You're right, they're not just different but relevant to the episode, they can foreshadow or highlight the importance of a particular region to the current episode, remind viewers of the geography, emphasise the different factions. Much more than a static credit - the music is also a fantastic mood setter in this case. The different places are shown with slightly different flourishes too, unless I'm mistaken, the style of the credits is really good.

I think you can tell I'm a fan!

People have done this with Matroska playlists already for some series, although it's not always worth the amount of work that gets put into it. (For example, the opening might change from episode to episode so that spoiler characters aren't shown before they show up in the series.)

Or still shown after they are no longer on the show. I've considered cutting my videos to exclude the intro but it's not an exact science and sometimes the intro is different and I don't want to miss that. In the end most intros are not long enough to worry about cutting (though GoT is LONG). If it's long I can just FF through.

Some release groups do this. It's incredibly annoying. It might have made sense a decade ago. Especially, I think, some of THORA's really high-quality rips. OK its 22GB. I've saved maybe half a GB doing this intro/outro in separate files. Does it really matter?

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