>>8
I'd rather he use something better than MP3. There's no reason to use MP3 today and in the future, unless you want compatibility with obsolete devices which only support MP3. Suggested alternatives:
- lossy: Vorbis(2.0), AAC(2.0 and higher), AC3 (not as much).
- lossless: FLAC, wavpak, Monkey's Audio, many others.
While Vorbis compresses slightly better than AAC, it's probably less supported on portable devices/standalones, while AAC is likely much better supported.
MKV is likely the current best(when it comes to features and supported formats, it's also relatively low overhead) container at the moment. As for video, H.264/AVC1 is a good choice, unless you have a good reason not to use it (like encoding something for a commercial enterprise that can't afford paying patent royaltees - this is rarely an issue for individuals, as everyone uses it, much like MP3 and many other patented formats).
The only reason using an inferior stream encoding (audio or video) would be acceptable is when the stream is encoded in a lossy way and you would want to avoid recompressing it in another lossy way and degrading the source further.