If you are getting lens distortion, you can pu ton a grid overlay over the map and use the "straightening" feature of Hugin (and other panorama software) when stitching to correct for lens distortions. The feature allows you to designate horizontal and vertical lines and will bend the image to make it so.

As more and more people get multiple devices, the push-back against DRM will increase, and move from the small population of early adopter tech-savvy consumers, to the larger population "normal" consumers- once they find that they can't move their legally bought content between their devices they will tell their friends not to buy it. My prediction is that the format with the most easily "cracked" DRM will also be the most popular format & will win.

Also, having just been through the deep-dive purchasing decision process for a new plasma TV, it was interesting to see that at a normal viewing distance, on a 50" display, HD or good progressive scan DVD produced a similar picture quality to my eyes (HD picture was subjectively about 5% better... this is comapred to 576p upscaled by the TV to 768 lines).
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted -viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

Summary- at more than 10 foot viewing distance with a 50" plasma screen there is no benefit to more than 576 lines (us PAL types are in luck here). About 13 foot for NTSC 480P. So for 42" HD is probably a waste of time everywhere. For 50" it is more useful in NTSC territory as long as you sit fairly close up, and marginal for PAL territory.

Also, I saw one HD feed split into similar sets from the same manufacturer, one set was 1080 line the other 768 line. At normal viewing distances no noticable difference.