[mythtvnz] Question about quality from satellite

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 22:05:44 +1200, you wrote:

>Actually I might not have made myself clear enough in the original post :-)
>
>I appreciate that I am only ever using SD or I guess 576 and not HD.
>
>What I am saying is that sometimes some programs seem much better quality
>than others with both being the same supposed resolution. I am theorizing
>that the ones that appear to be better quality are actually ones that are
>showing as full HD on terrestrial but scaled down for satellite.
>
>I was wondering if anyone had any more info or better theory - perhaps it's
>just my imagination.
>
>I guess the bitrate is probably the place to look, I don't know.
>
>Cheers

Bitrate is one obvious thing to check.  I find Mediainfo is a good
tool for looking inside a file's format:

  http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

But you can have a high bit rate and crap quality if someone was not
doing their job properly when they converted the video from its
original source format.  I have seen some horrible amateur AVI files
with high bit rates where the conversion was only done with one pass
and they did not deinterlace properly or used bad filters.  You would
hope that professional video engineers would do better, but it is not
always the case.