Re:Physicality (Score 1)

However, it's all relative: even in video, a level of quality is going to eventually be reached where typical people just can't see the difference. Because audio is so much simpler to record, we reached this level technologically long before we will with video, but it will happen eventually.

Surely that point has been reached already, you've got DVD -> MPEG-4 (divx, xvid, etc).

The quality difference between XviD and DVDs is not that big, especially with multiple passes, yet the size is significantly smaller. That's exactly the same situation as MP3s, sure one format is by definition lower quality, but you can't really tell in most situations.

Or where you referring to the quality of the original images, before any compression?