The iPlayer videos using their "flashvhigh"-profile shouldn't be used for long-term storage.
Let's first compare it to what we already have, the scene xvid releases. Scene on top, iPlayer below.
http://img145.imageshack.**/img145/5056/scene.jpg
http://img379.imageshack.**/img379/2323/iplayer.jpg
What do we see?
The iPlayer has quite a lot more pixels, but it's showing a lot less of the image, for example take a look at Jeremy's outboard motor. It's cropped on all four sides, not related to changing its aspect ratio to fit the iPlayer.
It's not a "better" image due to its many pixels, it's quite squishy and soft, if you know what I mean. More pixels, no more detail, less image.
When watching the iPlayer episodes some shots become quite irritating, for example the presentation of the old fast Fords. The cropping results in bits of the car cut off, even though obviously the camera crew intended to have the entire car in the frame.
Oh, and no BBC logo with the scene release
Let's zoom in on James' sailcar...
http://img145.imageshack.**/img145/7636/scenecropa.jpg http://img379.imageshack.**/img379/6403/iplayercrop.jpg
Two things to notice here, first you can see how much is missing in the iPlayer image, with that mast he would fit through all the bridges in the world :lol:
Secondly you can see a few compression artifacts in the scene release, but no overall difference in detail. You might even say that the scene release would not have those artifacts if they cropped off the same bits of the image to improve bits per pixel
In case you wanted to burn an episode onto a CD you would curse the iPlayer one for being 720MB
while other episodes are well under that, for example ep4 at 661MB. Using a fixed average bitrate regardless of the duration is ok for web viewing, bad for archiving.
I'll have a video comparison of scene vs iPlayer vs h264 from the original broadcast later