On Apr 19, 2010, at 8:07 AM, John Carmonne wrote:
I'm thinking of getting a big TV to watch my movie library on I would like to use one of my machines as a server for this via Apple Airport Express. I want to know the best format to convert my rips to for this and what I can expect quality wise. Also the BT issue is something I want to explore here.
I think the subject of video formats is somewhat in flux at the moment. Apple is a giant proponent of the H264 codec, but Google and most of the open source crowd don't like H264 because the codec isn't open source. Google owns a similar proprietary codec called VP8 that they acquired when the bought On2 Technologies, and it's rumored that Google will change VP8 to open source as early as this week. If they do this, it's likely that HTML5 will become more of a viable web standard for future video. Unfortunately, VP8 isn't currently supported in iTunes, so if Apple plays hardball with Google like they are with Adobe Flash things will get interesting.
For now, the most compressed video codec recognized in iTunes is H264 and the format used by Handbrake (.m4v) will create compressed rips of DVDs in any desired quality that will catalog and play these movies directly from iTunes. The future may be very different, but for now, I think .m4v with H264 is the best format for iTunes compatibility.
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