Technically, the developing trend is ironic: although encoders have improved dramatically in the last five years, have become much faster and can produce an MPEG-2 image of near perfect precision within the limitations of the format the quality on most discs is actually on the decrease.

The poor "exploitation" of the disc space is also due to limited time of preparation and testing. Very few discs are made using 2-pass methods, where the film is analyzed sequence by sequence - and the GOP structure aligned to the best way possible. A simple, default setting is all too often used instead; in which all films, black and white as well as color; video based interlaced signals @30fps as well as film-based 480p 24 or 576p 25 material is encoded the same way