iPod Movies on a Mac!!

[carduser22]

A Few questions for movies on a Mac!!

I know the movies from iTunes are 620 X 480, right? (680 x 420?) Are the movies from iTunes H.264 or mpeg? (it seems they would be in mpeg because they are around 1 GB-meaning smaller than h.264 files)

What exactly is H.264 and, for most people, is there that big of a difference in quality? (or it just depends on the movie?)

How much bigger is h.264 than mpeg-4 (double?), Or does it depend on the movie (action film=more framerate?)

How come ripped movies play better in VLC than Quicktime? (for me at least)

 

[Sweetfeld28]

First, most of the movies played on your iPod are 640x480. Second, I rip my movies down [using Handbrake] to MPEG 4. H.264, just seems to take forever to encode, for me at least. H.264 lets you scale it to what ever size you want, i think; while if you try to do the same with a MPEG-4 that was encoded at the 640x480 res, it will become blurry/distorted.

My Handbraked files are usually around 500MB, while the H.264 files are bigger [don't quote me on that though, i haven't done one in awhile -trying it right now].

As for the VLC vs. Quicktime? I am not sure why this is. Maybe it is because VLC plays movies in more of a stream, or tube, than DVD Player or Quicktime; they both play movies in Chapters. I could be wrong though?