Originally posted by: s7en

And do we know if the original broadcast was in MPEG4? I'm 95% sure it wasn't. AFAIK, all broadcast HD would be MPEG2. If you're finding other versions, it's because people have re-compressed it. So that wouldn't be an advantage.

I'm not sure why this is even up for debate.

Yes, the recent German Star Wars HDTV broadcasts were MPEG4. Premiere HD is a MPEG4 based channel.
"Premiere is broadcasting the HD channels using the new MPEG4/H.264 compression procedure "

MPEG2 may be typical of US HDTV broadcasters, but in Europe MPEG4 seems to be the preferred choice. Here in the UK both Sky HD and the BBC's HD service are also broadcast in MPEG4.
Which means another lot of MPEG4 Star Wars HDTV broadcasts when Sky shows all six movies on New Years Day - and another potential source for english language HDTV version of the movies at that point.

More info on UK HDTV standards here.

You learn something new every day

Thanks for letting me know! Still, too bad about the PAL speed-up. Otherwise this would have been great!