All of the Digital Video you watch in your Home Theater is "compressed".  ALL of it!  Whether it comes off an optical disc, or read from a media file you play, or as a program you stream from an Internet service, or even as a program you watch from a local, on-air, Digital TV station.  Compression reduces both the amount of space necessary to store the video, and -- often more important -- the data rate needed to transmit that video or to read it off of storage.

But too MUCH compression will damage picture quality in ways difficult to ignore!  In this post I'll cover the basics of video compression, along with a case study of video compression as applied to SD-DVD movie discs -- where the sins of poorly implemented compression are rife!  I'll end with some recommendations on what to look for when picking up an SD-DVD title to maximize your odds of getting great picture quality.