exscape

It’s always possible to re-encode video; it’s usually called transcoding. However, you lose a bit of quality every time you encode, so you might not gain much in the end. You can offset a bit of the quality loss by encoding at a higher bitrate/quality factor/etc than you otherwise would, but that of course takes up extra space.

Well, almost no losses. No resistive losses. Should still lose some because of electromagnetic fields surrounding the cabling interacting with the environment.