Comment by StillBored

I find the 480p setting on my plex server at home actually looks better than most of the 1080p HD streams on the internet.

Although to be fair, I suspect that a lot of times what I'm looking at are mpeg videos that have been recompressed a half dozen or more times with different encoders. Each encoder having prioritized different metrics. So, the the quality gets worse until it doesn't really matter how good the compression algorithm is. Each new re-compression is basically spending 3/4 of its bits maintaining the compression artifacts from the previous two passes.