When I download any type of video from the internet (e.g. music videos, movies), the quality when played seems to be bad. Are all videos supposed to be blurry because they are compressed? Is there any way to fix this? Will the quality be better once burned in a high quality format? Please help me on this.

Videos are compressed or sized down on the Internet so that they download faster to your computer. The only way to get true quality is if the actual website you got it from has it in full quality. Really, unless using special costly software, it is not very easy to gain quality in Internet video.

I know this very well since we broadcast on the Internet. Most of our Internet reports are available in pretty high quality, but they can take a long time to download. The higher quality the video is, the more space and bandwidth it consumes, which in turn costs the website owner more money.

When burning these videos onto cd's I know they have to be encoded before they can be burnt. Does this encoding process help the quality? If I were to burn in VCD format, will there be much difference in the quality of the video versus SVCD format?

There is a difference with VCD to SVCD, but still recording on a CD the quality is reduced once again to be compacted onto the CD. You will only get full quality when recording to a DVD. We used to use VCD, but we have now converted to DVD and the quality difference is incredible.

Even so, the quality cannot be increased, if anything, it will most likely stay the same or decrease.