Questions About AVI, WMV, and MPEG quality

[Friend_Al_23]

Hello. Newbie question here. When you compress a file to AVI, will it loose any audio or video quality or is it just the same, only compressed? Same question goes for WMV. When you compress a file to WMV, will it loose any audio or video quality or is it just the same, only compressed?

[David K]

This is a complicated topic, but the simple answer is: to compress is to necessarily lose some quality from the source material. But you can define the degree of compression in each format through the amount of bitrate you choose.

[Friend_Al_23]

Huh? Also a follow-up, when you convert an MPEG file (*.mpeg) to VCD, do you loose any quality?