Originally Posted by magpie

The black bars down the sides of the picture for the France game cannot require too much data to produce (no motion, no edges, only one colour). This would allow much more of the MPEG stream to act on the actual picture, increasing its quality.

Assuming that the bitrate of the channel remained the same for both games, this would give a higher quality (albeit smaller) picture for the france game.

IF this is true, then it cannot be said that the picture quality problems are from the source. It is more likely to be a run of the mill bitrate problem.

I'm just taking an educated guess here though - anyone know if it could be right?