If your movie is a delicious cookie then a container is the jar you keep it in so the ants can't get to it. It's still a cookie, it's just in a fancy box. MKV is a container that can hold all different kinds of cookies, h264 encoded cookies are my favorite. Handbrake is killer, btw. Lots of options.
Though you might consider downloading rips of movies you already own. It'll save some wear on your disk drive, and it'll probably take less time too.
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