I've watched the "download scene" since the very first animated GIFs were being passed off as movies. I remember watching GL movies in DOS. So I'm not new to any of this, I've followed online video since its infancy. Even to this day, downloads are wholly inferior to your own tv recordings.
There are times when a good download can be almost as good as a tv recording (especially if you're not using the best equipment to capture/record at home). These tend to be far and few between.
Why is it that Europeans (British especially) seem to be the only ones that can make a decent XVID "download" encode?
Right now I'm getting Doctor Who episodes, XVID files, as they air. The files are pretty close to perfect, no encode flaws, no over-compression, no audio errors, no sync problems, etc.
Americans and to a lesser degree Canadians, seem to screw everything up. Australians do a pretty cruddy job too, somewhere between European and Canadian quality. I can never find even one whole episode that does not have the overscan cropped, the video aspect wrong, the video over-filtered, the video with inadequate bitrate, or the audio with a sync problem. Given that 51% voted for Bush, I'm not surprised more than half of the files are fubar, but it's more than just half, it's nearly all of them!
Once in a great while, I find a decent copy of an episode.
I only look to downloads when the show I want to see is unavailable in the USA, and nobody in that country that I know can help with the recordings. A few times, I've looked to downloads of USA shows to getting episodes I'm missing.
Rarely does anything outside of Europe look good. I don't get it.
My rant for the day.