Movie Resolutions

[509eagle]

This is going to drive me to drinking.

I have the following devices:
Iphone 3Gs
Ipod Touch (wifes)
Ipad
WD Live Tv
73" HD TV

I have a lot of movies that had run through Handbrake for the Iphone and Touch. But now seems to get best effect i need 3 set of movies, at different resolution. This is crazy.

How are others dealing with this. Just a good thing hard disk space is cheap.

 

[Doju]

Here's my solution, I find it works quite well and I can't imagine much else.

For HDTV

Mac mini with 1TB external HDD attached (you could do this with the WDTV obviously). Store all my movies and TV Shows here in 720p or 1080p right from the source. (MKVs, non-converted.) Look stunning, I don't want to touch what's already great.

For iPad
Converted all of these to 1024*576 in Handbrake (just let my Mac mini run Handbrake for a week straight, haha) and they look fantastic. They're now all on my MBP in iTunes with all the meta data (thanks iFlicks!) and look STUNNING on the iPad.

They take up a lot of space, though, but I have a 64GB so I can hold quite a few.

iPhone
Unfortunately the recent iPhones can only do up to 960*something as of now, just a few pixels short of iPad's max resolution, so all my flicks in iTunes won't transfer.

So I just use Air Video for now instead of converting them all over again to 480*320. Stream them from iTunes and it converts them to play on the iPhone on the fly.

I figure the new iPhone will be higher res (if Gizmodo and Gruber are correct) so it should be able to do it this summer. Plus, I'd be annoyed if I converted all my content to 480*320 and the new iPhone doubled that and I'd have to throw it all out.

--

Basically that's the best I think you can do. Two sets. One will look great on the HDTV, and another for the iPads and iPhones/iPods with Air Video. Otherwise just convert it one more time to 480*320 and have three.