Originally Posted by **********

Getting ripped movies online is just as bad because the thieves compress an already compressed movie down to nothing in order to get it out to you. The bandwidth required by blu-ray to produce 1024p lines at 24 Bits per pixel and at 60 frames per second with 5.1 Channels of discreet surround sound is about 3,000 megabits per second. DVD's in the old 480i format needed 5 to 8 mbps. You will never get anything even close to this bitrate watching a downloaded ripped movie regardless of what stupid compression format they used. (I'm not talking about download speed, I'm talking about video bitrates). Compressed video and audio looks and sounds like shit compared to native, uncompressed goodness. The amount of data required to present the image and sound is important. The more data you have, the better the image quality and the richer the sound.