> Pretty much *every* video compression standard is lossy in some
> way.
Yep. I was going to say that...
> Also, you have an analogue recording, so the digitalness of the
> original source means nothing, other than you'll have two separate
> sets of transmission artefacts on the recording -- one set from the
> original digital transmission, and one set from your recording to tape
Analogue artefacts are generally not very noticeable to the human eye -
but they usually end up being *very* expensive to encode digitally.
Filtering the picture will often give a good increase in compressibility
without noticeable difference of the image.
Vic.