wow .... that's a bit confusing of an explanation there, itachi, and not exactly accurate...

Once the quality is "bad" it's pretty impossible to make it look "good" again. The encoder doesn't do that, because they know the principles of information loss and aren't going to waste their time.

Most groups have raw hunters. Some priveleged groups have raw cappers too. Basically a raw hunter will go around finding as many different versions of a raw as they can, usually from japanese filesharing programs and other places. In those cases, you can't usually tell where the raw came from unless it's tagged with a rippers handle...

A raw capper on the other hand lives somewhere that they can get japanese tv broadcasts (which usually means japan ) and will actually go through the process of capturing and cleaning up raws and supplying them directly to a particular group. I know a few groups who have their own raw cappers, and usually they also need raw hunters to supplement the cappers, because capping is an intensive job (have to know a lot about encoding video to make a rawcap look good, and have to have a lot of spare cpu time for each episode).

Raw hunters spend a LOT of time and effort finding good raws to use, have to have japanese language extensions installed, have to be around shortly after every episode airs and have to know what kanji strings to search for. They also have to have good internet connections and a healthy dose of luck.

Sometimes it's just easier to get r2 dvds instead :-p.