Just thought I'd share this one with you all. I have spent hours and hours trying to find a point and click way to convert movies from DivX or whatever to be played on AppleTV and had a couple of choices. Rip to MP4 without H264 (poor quality:bitrate), learn all sorts of tools and download 4 different apps to get the job done after hours of reading up on what the hell to do on doom9.org, or buy some dodgy program to encode H264 (yeah I did this, what a waste of $35).

The other week I was reading through doom9 and saw a thread for RipBot264. It's free, fast, configurable and does the best encoding I've ever been able to do. I was going down the path of hacking my ATV so it would be able to play DivX but the implementation is so buggy that I was stoked to find a way to convert and stil keep the quality of my movies. I've since re-encoded all movies that I had, lucky I kept the original files.

Also, I think iTunes supports H264 better than other MPEG4 codecs as it can tag the files themselves rather than you losing all Season/Episode/Title info if you re-add them to your library.

Worth a look: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/RipBot264

1. get quicktime pro & the divx codec.
2. export divx avi to apple tv format
3. drag to itunes
4. there is no step 4!