From home made films to Apple TV

Years ago I converted a series of 8mm and 16mm films (from the 50's and 60's) to DVDs (.VOB files). Several of these were recently converted to .mov using MPEGStreamClipper. These .mov files do not run on my AppleTV. Is MPEG4 the only format that runs on AppleTV and what format, bit rate and frame combinations provide the best resolution?