I own a 4200NEX and have a number of DVDs formatted to play on my AppleTV. I use Handbrake on my Mac. I have had success playing downloaded material from the internet but not a DVD. I have been looking at this forum and on pioneers website and it seems that the 4200NEX can take bigger and faster movies than pioneer claims, but there are certain limits.

Do any users use handbrake to format movies?

Are there specific maximum frame sizes, bitrates, etc that could make these movies watchable in both AppleTV and NEX?

Any help greatly appreciated!

I own a 4200NEX and have a number of DVDs formatted to play on my AppleTV. I use Handbrake on my Mac. I have had success playing downloaded material from the internet but not a DVD. I have been looking at this forum and on pioneers website and it seems that the 4200NEX can take bigger and faster movies than pioneer claims, but there are certain limits.

Do any users use handbrake to format movies?

Are there specific maximum frame sizes, bitrates, etc that could make these movies watchable in both AppleTV and NEX?

Any help greatly appreciated!

What about taking the movies that work and checking the info and reproducing those setting with your own attempts.

You can take pioneer's specs and basically throw it out the window.  For instance, I"m using a large 256GB PNY SD card to play movies to a rear overhead monitor.  The sole reason for choosing the pioneer was because it allows you to do this, as well as select other sources to play to the rear.  

 

Also, for reference, the highest resolution I can seem to pump into the pioneer's HDMI from my raspberry pi is 580p video.  

 

But to your question.  I'm using wondershare video converter ultimate to batch encode my videos, I have a fully loaded 256gb SD card, loaded with MP4 videos.  I use wondershare specifically because it can take full advantage of my nVidia Geforce 970 video card when encoding.  So after ripping my DVD's and Blu-rays with MakeMKV, my computer with encode the file down in less than 7 minutes for a DVD and less than 15minutes for a blu-ray.  It's set to MP4, H264, AAC audio.  Bitrate doesn't seem to matter much, I usually do about 2000-3000kbps for my tablets. I drop these same files into my pioneer's SD card.  

 

The few movies I've found that don't work are usually because of the aspect ratio, the pioneer simply doesn't like some movies aspect ratio's and refuses to play them.  

 

Also FYI, for your iPADs, iPhone, and APPLE TV GEN4.  I use an app called INFUSE(https://firecore.com/).  It's absolutely the best way to watch movies on apple devices.  It plays everything I throw at it, and doesn't need me to special encode videos for apple.  It plays every video I give it.  You need a NAS unit to host the movies though.  I use a QNAP NAS, but you could also use an old laptop or something to host files on your network.  A raspberry pi2/3 and an external hard drive also works well for $35.