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AppleTV Hits the Streets
Stories are starting to pop up all over the web about the AppleTV, which evidently means that Apple has set loose the hounds of marketing and the units are (or will be tomorrow) available in Apple stores. Still no word on whether or not it plays DivX files. That will be the key to me purchasing one.
mp4 is not a proprietary Apple format, but an ISO standard that anyone can support. VLC Media player supports it. Also, ffmpeg has h264. When it comes to which has better hardware support, mp4 wins. When it comes to software support, mp4 wins. MPEG4 is an open standard. There are patents involved, but no royalties. Matroska was created to avoid patents, whereas mp4 has many patents in it. Matroska surely violates someones patents, but we just don't know whose yet. MPEG 4 has all the patent issues sorted out.
I actually just finished transcoding all of my video to mp4 as i prefer its subtitle support over the cheesy avi hacks. DivX was created during the non standard days of MPEG4, as the spec was not finalized. That spec is now finalised, and the standard codec is h264 in an mp4 container. These videos play in Windows, Linux or any other OS which has an h264 codec. They can be imported into iTunes as best as i know. My iTunes question of the day is actually which subtitle formats they use, as I don't know the answer to that.