A few more quesitons on capturing

[tgc225]

I read Lord Smurf's website and it was extremely helpful in helping me understand things like deinterlacing and resolutions that I was wondering about. I have a few addition questions:

1) What's with the resolutions always being xxx X 480. Is that just the way it is? I'm guessing the pixels aren't perfectly square like in computer monitors? And does a higher first number mean better quality necessarily? I mean, I know VHS tapes are worse and they have a low number. But for example, if Dish Network broadcasts in 480x480 and DirecTV does so in 520x480 or whatever, does that mean their broadcast is higher quality, or what?

2) It was stated on that site that satellite broadcasts were done in a similar format to MPEG2. Now, my question has to do with converting to the best format. If I do a satellite capture, then I convert it to a DVD/computer standard MPEG2 file, will the quality be virtually the same as the capture because I really didn't do any re-encoding? Or is there more to this?

Or on the other hand, in analogue cable captures, since they are analogue and not digital, when I go to MPEG2 from capturing a raw AVI in cable, I will lose some quality when going to MPEG2, correct?

Or will the quality on either all end up being the same because satellite loses a bit of quality when the files are converted to MPEG2 before being beamed to your receiver?

Heh, sorry if my question isn't clear, I can try explaining it if people don't understand.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to basically ask is, since satellite is sent in a mpeg2 similar format, and DVRs and computers can capture in MPEG2, will the captured MPEG2 be virtually the exact same quality as the broadcast MPEG2 file? Is there some kind of quality settings you would have to change to accomplish this?

On the other hand, analogue cable comes in, well I guess non-digitally, so coverting that to MPEG2 would cause a quality loss, correct?

And that last bit I added was wondering since satellite broadcasts were made in MPEG2 before being beamed out, there's already a quality loss on the video, while in analogue, there isn't, but when you convert an analogue RAW AVI to MPEG2, you get an almost identical file to the satellite broadcast.

Or is the quality difference so negligible that I should stop worrying about all of this

3) I guess this is related to the question about. What's the best way to archive files, and what's the best way to distribute small clips online?

[tgc225]

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