Square or PAL pixels to Squeeze?

Hi!

I'm a videoeditor with some skills in coding for the web. (I’m not an expert and yes I have bought Aarons DVD :-) I use to export DV-PAL from FCP and input to Squeeze to create flv-files. And that works fine!

Today I stepped into a new, exciting problem. We have a new customer, a streaming company, which wanted us to produce some movies for their clients web site. They wanted us to deliver the clips in DV 320x240, no other specifications. When the client published them they didn’t look as good as they (or we) wanted.

At first the streaming company told us that it was because we have delivered interlaced files. I tried to explain that it shouldn’t affect the quality only the interlace/deinterlace problem, if not they coding application (they encode in Flash for this project) made a poor quality while deinterlacing.

Then I found that if I import the file into Squeeze the program identified the file to 320 x 241. And somewhere (probably in the browser) the file has to be scaled one pixel = poor quality)

Then I made a full frame DV square pixel 768x576 and imported to Squeeze to scale it down and Squeeze still think the file is 320x241. Then I created a DV (PAL) 720x576 and Squeeze scales it to 320x 240.

So, my question is: Should you always import PAL-pixels to Squeeze (that will make it impossible to import files in other sizes than full frame) and other encoding applications?

Thanks!