Good format/codec for movies on hard drive

[resloan]

I am planning to put all my DVD movie collection on a dedicated 1.5Tb hard drive on my computer and watch them on TV over a wired ethernet to a WD TV Live media player. I would like to have the menus and chapters, although not essential, especially for my seasonal episodes of Star Trek series(4 to a disk). The media player doesn't play ISO or IFO files, but will play VOBs. This limitation may change with future firmware updates. Any suggestions on a good way to store the movies on the hard drive appreciated. I do have quite a collection (all Star Trek series and movies) plus about 80 regular movies. No HD.
Thanks

[Inspector.Gadget]

We don't do "best" around here. If you want menus, you need to stick with DVD or AVCHD.

Maximum compression efficiency, at this point in time, is the domain of x264.

[osgZach]

I own a WD TV Live, and it played an ISO I tested last night just fine. It just won't play the menus and will go straight to the movie. Or whatever track it hits first I guess. So yes, it will plays ISO's (or maybe in certain situations only? I haven't thuroughly tested it)

If you want DVD like Menus, you need to stick DivX Ultra or something to that effect. You can either just encode with DivX itself, or you can use Xvid instead, and then "wrap" it inside a DivX file w/menus.

I used to do this for my Philips DVD player that supported DivX Ultra. I prefer Xvid but haven't encoded with DivX in a long time. With 1.5TB I am guessing it won't really matter. If you are interested in going with Xvid but using DivX for the menus, let me know. I wrote a short (somewhat incomplete) guide on the process a while ago and can try and find the file.

Honestly, I find the built-in navigation to work just fine. Just use folders for a hierarchy.

For TV shows its really simple. (xx being digit indicating episode number to keep them in listed order)

Show/Season/XX - Episode Title
I don't think it supports MKV chapters though, which kind of sucks for skipping OP/ED sequences, etc. But I'll take the bare list and x264 compression/quality in place of bloated stuff with Menus.