> > I hope they're done, but not in a lossy format, not in a million years. > Sorry, but analogue to digital is already lossy
No excuse to make it worse on purpose.
If anything these are the worst kind of things to try and encode with an mpeg-like codec; brief fast moving scenes, flashing graphics, irregular patterns, lots of jumps from one scene to another, cartoon like-art, interlaced content... all things that MPEG will introduce noticeable artifacts on.
I'm no longer surprised when I see absolutely awful TV broadcasts because somebody took this approach when converting their old tapes to digital formats years ago, it's near criminal how bad some of them are and you know it's what they're broadcasting, not just the station quality, because everything newer on the same channels is much better.
Seriously, people need to do it properly, not act selfishly and think they can save some pennies in the short term. In a few years the sizes we're talking about for these things, even with lossless compression will be as laughable as the capacity of a floppy disk.