Poor quality Sky movies

And I mean technically poor, let me explain...

Ever since I first got Sky I have archived TV shows and movies that I liked, first to video then to DVR, then as Sky+ came along I fitted bigger and bigger hard drives to hold everything I needed, one of the drawbacks of non Sky+ storage was that I was never able to get a digitally perfect reproduction and the sound was NEVER in DD 5.1, until recently when I got myself a PVR receiver and a CAM capable of decoding Sky (with a genuine sub card of course).

With this set-up I could transfer a tv show/ movie to HDD as a transport stream and then with the aid of a superb piece of software called VideoRedo I was able to make a practically perfect digital copy on DVD including DD5.1 soundtracks, oh happy days

As I found my way around the software I was startled to find out how poor the movies are actually broadcast, firstly the resolution is 544 x 576 and I have never seen a Bit rate above 2 Mbps, what this translates to is a movie including a DD5.1 soundtrack at approx 1.5GB!!

Let me put that in perspective, normally a DVD movie wouldn't even fit on a single layer (4.7 GB) disc, but I can put 3 Sky movies on one disc!!

No wonder they're pushing Sky HD so much :eek::rolleyes: