I am confused again thought I had this concept understood but not sure.

I am encoding in Divx from an MPEG2 encoding of a TV program captured using the PVR-250 and is captured at a resolution of 480x480 and some are 640x480 and play back on the TV with the correct aspect ratio using Mythtv (using linux). Mostly I have done DVD 720X480 conversion using Gordian Knott. I never realized that when I encode with GK that when I set the resolution I typically used 512x272 and that maintained the 4:3 aspect ratio.

Here is what I am confused on. Again

For playback on a TV I thought I wanted interlaced encodings for best picture and that required a resolution of ### x 480. But when I capture interlaced MPEG2 at 640x480 or 480x480 and then encode to 512x272 or 480x256 I maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio but do I loose the interlace?

If I do in fact loose the interlacing do I now just have a progressive scan version and the encoder (transcode in my case) deinterlaced while encoding (I did not tell transcode to use a deinterlace filter).

Appreciate the help in understanding this.