Having a little time under the hood, I think I like MakeMKV a tad bit better, it's a little more developed and lets you select what you'd like to rip such as movie only. BluRay Decrypter is a little more about just copying all of the disc. Great to see free solutions for this stuff finally.

I'm very impressed with how sophisticated Handbrake has become. I frowned when I first found out the author removed XVID support, but the quality it gives is a lot better. I'll put it this way, once I got my first HD rip in the same resolution as the original with great quality considering the filesize, it made this man look at his XVID collection with a little less um, excitement. This kinda blows them away.

Best part is Handbrake builds are made for OS X, Windows and some Linux distros.

x.264 is nicer than XViD, but it's got a long way until it reaches XViD popularity.

Oh yeah, XVID isn't going away, it's convenient & I still like it for what it is.

I should say this isn't my first foray into this, I did some Handbrake mp4 tests a couple years ago using DVD video sourced material. I thought it was marginally better, but not enough to redo my whole collection. It really shines with high def sourced material, though, and I'm sure there's been plenty of optimizations since I last tried it.

MP4 is a popular container for x.264 codec. MKV seems to be the standard though. It does have more features than MP4.

I've known aMatroska was good for subs for a while. It's the format I've been setting all my hi def encodes for (I've done 4 more movies). Hey, I can easily stream it over the network to my machines that can handle high def *lol*, that's what I wanted. I don't know the ratio of MP4 vs. MKV for general hardware support. I'd just buy something like an Oppo.

My main use for MP4 is for my iPod, not much else. I did some DVD rips for it for when I travel. Can watch a movie on the plane or I can use the video output to a non high def set (lots of hotels still have them) where I can play movies that are almost DVD quality resolution.

I don't really follow scene standards though I don't thumb my nose at them either. I am amazed the quality some release groups are able to get into a small XVID file... and other times I wince at the blocking during some scenes I get when viewing on a 24" monitor. The whole splitting movie in half to fit on 2 CDs seems kind of old by now- why not just burn a single file to DVD if you want to use it on hardware? Some Divx-enabled DVD players won't even *read* CDs.

Just use NanDub or VirtualDub to join the two 700MB files. That way you can put three 1.4GB movies on a 4.7GB DVD to watch on a "DiVX" DVD player.

Via "direct stream copy", right. I've used VirtualDub and I think VirtualDubMod. It's nice to have a DVD full of XVIDs. Used to play them in my office on days I worked at home.

I've had a lot of success with this, have encoded about 10 movies so far.

The only HiDef film so far that's given me trouble when streaming over wireless G is my encode of Clash of the Titans (2010 Version). The file size is about 4.48GB, and I started getting skipping when playing over the network.

I prefer players that automatically 'stack' multi disc videos.

Recent encode:

The Shining
Video is same resolution 1920x1072 pixels
Audio is 48000Khz 2 Channel Stereo Dolby Pro Logic II AAC
File size 3.87GB
Plays fine over my Wireless-G network.
Definitely won't work on something like an iPod or AppleTV.