laidbackliam said:
whats the largest video compression allowed on the ipod? i want to rip king kong onto my laptop, but i don't want it to be the standard ipod compression.
i remember hearing that it could handle more, but i don't remember what that number is
H.264 = 320x240 max, 768kbps (remember, that's audio & video combined so about 600kbps video + 128kbps audio)
MPEG4 = 480x480 max, 2.5Mbps (as above).
iLounge has a good feature on this as there are some higher resolutions that will work on MPEG4 compression. If you're just going to watch the video on your iPod it's best to go with H.264 (takes an eon to compress though, Intel Macs can get close to real-time but PPC Macs take forever). For TV viewing you should use the higher resolution and higher bit rate from MPEG4, it also takes much less time to compress (Intel Macs can get around 60fps vs 24fps for H.264, PPC Macs are less on both counts).
EDIT:
If you're just interested in ripping to your laptop and don't want to view on your iPod, use Handbrake to rip at the DVDs native resolution and use H.264 at ~1500kbps, audio at 160kbps. It will take a while but as you have a MBP you could get close to real time encoding ie. it will take the full length of the movie to rip but from what I can see it's nigh on indistinguishable from the original DVD. You could also use MPEG4 compression for a faster rip time but the quality isn't quite as good.
