I have done some searching and I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for. I have a 40gb ATV and I'm thinking about buying a Terabyte HD to put into my Mac Pro to rip all of my DVDs too, then selling the DVDs. Last night I was playing around with the new handbrake update and found that they have presets for the AppleTv and for Film though the film does not convert into MP4. So I have a few questions that I would appreciate your help with.

1) Is hand brake the best thing to use?
2)Is there going to be a big enough difference in quality from MP4 and MKV that it would be worth hacking the ATV?

I appreciate any help.

If your just ripping the disk image and reburning you don't need to convert (ie. Handbrake) try Mac the Ripper to rip the disk image.

You may try aimersoft dvd ripper for mac, I always use it to rip DVD on my mac os x, my friends recommend it to me, it's easy to use and works nice for me, here is a step by step guide about it
http://www.aimersoft.com/tutorial/dv...r-for-mac.html

Well I use handbrake and mac the ripper, I think there's no problem if the container is mov instead of mp4.

And for divx, xvid and those I did a small applescript to just put a 1sec applemovie before the divx movie, and that is how iTunes thinks that is a valid movie.

Of course you need to have perian on the appletv.

The problem is that you need quicktime pro to do this little trick ;(

And the script is a bit buggy too, need to work harder on it.

I'm not a developer though