“They first produced a master ‘international’ edit, which runs to about 25m30s. These featured three fades for commercial breaks; one after the opening titles, one mid-show and one just before the end titles. The titles were centred. I am told these should be considered the definitive versions.”

I have always heard it explained that they prepared one cut for the market with fewer commercial breaks and one cut for the market with more commercial breaks, so I’m not really sure I understand why they would create a master edit which was longer but had all of the extra commercial breaks and never actually aired anywhere (at least in its intended language).

But, to be honest, this is why the most desirable thing to me is just to have as much footage as possible from the multiple cuts whenever possible, because it still feels like calling any cut definitive is speculating.

“There are a few other changes, an entire extra guest in one episode, a different Waldorf and Statler balcony scene at the end of the Harry Belafonte episode, and possibly other differences.”

It seems like they only did one version of the German language end credits, which means that any episode where the proper cut has unique video under the end credits will be changed in Germany. When the Waldorf and Statler balcony end bit references the unique end credits, they swap it out for a more generic one.

Also, there’s a song sung by a mouse in a teacup in Waldorf and Statler’s balcony in Ethel Merman, there’s extra dialogue on the start of the sketch in German that doesn’t have any English dialogue on the audio, so I think that was also German specific.

If you want to get fine-toothed-comb about it, there are a lot of episodes missing single frames (or sometimes with doubled frames), I believe that was done for syncing purposes – the audio mixes are too clean around those for them to all be glitches.