Originally Posted by grahamlthompson:
“Judge for yourselves
One thing for certain the superb 5.1 track on the BBC recording more than made up for any minor differences in picture quality, a totally immersing experience. (assuming of course you have decent audio kit).”
Thanks Graham. On this showing the anamorphic BBC wins anyway so there's nothing to make up for.

(Rescaled unsing GIMP and Lanczos3 interpolation.) Totally agree on the sound quality--AC 5.1 vs mp2 stereo--no contest.
And it's not surprising if the BBC won--they had bitrate as required up their sleeve to start with, and they originated the pictures so this is just a test of encoders.
Before anyone jumps on comparing stills again, yes, it seems these are from highlights shows which complicates matters, and they are different frames so, assuming the encoders produce identical behaviour when fed the same images, then if they treat different frames differently then the comparison is void anyway.
Still interesting though. But if the topic is 1920 v 1440, a comparison with a 1440 ITV feed would work from a more level playing field.