Should I start converting my DVDs to H.264 or wait?

nordstrodamusnordstrodamus
Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
I am greatly anticipating iTV and the idea of storing all my media on a server accessible throughout the house. It would seem, however, that there is no way to preserve all th cool doodads (menus, subtitles, chapters, etc...) when converting them ot h.264.

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  • Reply 1 of 1
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nordstrodamus


    I am greatly anticipating iTV and the idea of storing all my media on a server accessible throughout the house. It would seem, however, that there is no way to preserve all th cool doodads (menus, subtitles, chapters, etc...) when converting them ot h.264.



    I'd definitely wait in order to find out the capabilities of the iTV. H.264 is not a single standard; there are different Profiles, each with different Levels that offer quality/cpu-power-required-to-decode trade-offs (the higher the quality, the harder to decode).



    The profiles are (in increasing order of quality): Baseline, Extended, Main, High, High 10, High 4:2:2.



    The iPod supports Baseline profile up to Level 2. QuickTime supports most of Main (still waiting for Apple to implement High Profile ).



    So, you need to wait until you know for sure the highest level of H.264 that the iTV will support, and then encode your DVDs (or, it may support MPEG-2, and then you needn't re-compress your DVDs at all).



    Oh, and, if you're not interested in iTunes Movie downloads, you may like to consider not bothering to wait for the iTV and just get one of these right now. Note: it says at the beginning that it is HDD based, but it is equipped with ethernet and the least expensive option comes without a HDD.
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