MPEG-4 is much more efficient than MPEG-2, so at a given bit rate MPEG-4 should look better than MPEG-2. That said the more bits the better the quality, until you get to lossless rate that is. MPEG-4 encodes on HD-DVD / Blu-Ray I think average about 15 MB/s so what HBO is doing is still only going to 50% of the quality of those discs. The optical formats can go much higher though.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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MPEG-4 is much more efficient than MPEG-2, so at a given bit rate MPEG-4 should look better than MPEG-2. That said the more bits the better the quality, until you get to lossless rate that is. MPEG-4 encodes on HD-DVD / Blu-Ray I think average about 15 MB/s so what HBO is doing is still only going to 50% of the quality of those discs. The optical formats can go much higher though.