How good can FLV be ?

[Seeker47]

[Warning: Noob-ish question]
This is only partially a conversion question, but here goes:

FLV seems to have become the dominant video format on the internet.
The vast majority of what you find on Youtube is FLV. (Or maybe all of it, because that is their requirement ?)
Almost all of that stuff I've seen -- from Youtube, especially -- looks pretty bad.
FLV is sort of to reasonably good quality video as MP3 is to the full-size WAV tracks on a CD, or maybe even a more compressed and worse compromise -- do I have that right ? But there seem to be a number of variables here, such as bitrate and how good the source "footage" was ? I just saw an FLV version of the trailer for the new Bond film, and it looked unusually good for FLV . . ..

They can get away with a lot in terms of FLV acceptability when it is only going to be seen in a window no bigger than a postcard, on a computer screen. When you run it through ConvertX2DVD and watch it on a tv, the image quality usually goes straight into the toilet. (I haven't tried this on a "best quality" FLV yet, though.) I'm wondering what the upper limits of FLV quality might be, or if it can only be regarded as a very limited format, for computer viewing only ?

[jagabo]

Just about all the high compression video formats/codecs are capable of very high quality. As good or better than DVD. The issue is the frame size and how much bitrate is used.