Originally Posted by directhex
we're talking DIGITAL satellite/cable here. the resolution is encoded into the video files which are sent around - what matters is the bitrate. Some carriers are pushing up to about 22 MBit, some as low as 6 (DVD, for comparison, is up to 10; freeview is up to 8)
Comparing bitrates across compression schemes can be very misleading.
MPEG4 is a lot more efficient then MPEG2 and therefore would require a lesser bitrate to deliver the same image as MPEG2.