What format for AV's

[ericmark]

I have 5 hard ware devices that will play audio visual (AV) a Blu-ray, DVD, recorder, Radio DVD, computer, Iphone.

But what I don't seem to be able to do is find a format which will work in all.

I made up one disk and was surprised to see the vast quality variation between the different DVD players. Had I not played it in three different players I could have very easy gone for MP4 for all, as in one player that format seems to work best.

Swapping format also seems to lower quality but don't really want to long term store in multi formats.

So MP4, WMV, AVI and then in each what setting? Most are originally either pte or spj format depending if made with Picturestoexe or Photostage of course also saved in exe format but that's PC only as is pte and spj.

Webcam connects with DVD recorder with firewire and then I have reverse the orignal DVD two folders say VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS clicking on files does not seem to work. It will play by just putting the DVD in but can't transfer files to PC to play latter.

Using ConverterLite does change them to one of the other formats but there are so many options.

Iphone seems worst will some MP4 files working and others do not. It took me ages to find I had a 3Gs so I know which option to select. Seems display size has to be correct.

So to archive on my hard drive which is connected with LAN to both PC and Blu-ray player what format should I use?

I begin to wonder if too good is a problem and if stored as HD does this mean some DVD players can't read?

Passing files to other is also a problem. What it the most universal format?

Even -R and +R seems to cause a problem with my dad's DVD player only reading one and I can never remember which.

At to NTSC and PAL that's also a problem every time I record something from my Blu-ray my DVD/Hard-Drive recorder saves it as NTSC not a clue how to change it. Everything else it records as PAL.

 

[Sam Gangee]

Iphone seems worst will some MP4 files working and others do not.

iTunes will normally warn you if the format is incorrect for the iPhone. But, regardless, if it doesn't work, you should be able to convert the file in iTunes to one that is compatible.

As for the rest, all I can say is that compressed video will always look worse than uncompressed and there is a variation between players in how they handle the decompression and accept the different +/- DVD formats.