I mentioned that the Reaper episode I had to pick up from the net would likely be higher quality than what I would have recorded. That's because generally someone will record such episodes from an HD source. But they'll still size the movie to smaller dimensions to make for faster file upload/download.

Generally the video frame will be scaled down to SD or sub-SD size. So the file might be 640x300 or similar instead of the 1280x720 the original may have been.