Is rescale to 640x480 required?

[Coert]

When transcoding PAL 4:3 content, I crop the 8 black pixels on the left and right. This results in a resolution of 704x576. I would prefer to not rescale the video, but would also like to be able to play it on Apple TV in the future.

I noticed that the default profile has rescaling enabled. Is the rescaling required to play the H.264 on Apple TV?

[Red Kawa]

It is required if you want your video playable both on the Apple TV and the iPod. If don't care about playing your video on the iPod, then just use the "H.264 HDTV 720p 3072kbps Stereo/160kbps" profile to maintain your resolution without any scaling. You also might want to lower the bitrate since 3Mbps is a bit excessive for DVD quality video.