Screen size, frame rate, color depth, encoding format, etc.

[WarpZone]

Okay, so I dabble in Flash cartoons. And maybe someday, I just might make one good enough to sell on DVD or be shown on TV. (Well, hey, I can dream, right?)

Except that DVD is dying, and Blu-ray just won the format wars, which means all the FAQs and Flash books are gonna suddenly be out of date. And soon we'll apparently have HD TV, and I have no idea what the format specifications on that are gonna be.

But for the moment, it seems to make the most sense for me to develop for the web right now, but keeping blu-ray in mind when I'm first setting up my stage size in Flash CS3 and choosing the colors for my characters.

So I guess what I'm saying is, please help me figure out what resolutions I should make my Flash movies at if the eventual goal is Blu Ray disc. Based on a few google searches, here are my best guesses, but any confirmations or corrections would be greatly appreciated:

Screen Size: 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. (Confirmed by numerous sources. Thanks, internet. )

Frame Rate: 24 frames per second (This is a guess? I saw some stats quoted from an official blu-ray gobbledygook report, but I have no idea what the 24 actually meant. I just assumed it was frame rate because 24 is the FPS for film.)

Color Depth: No idea. Please Help. Do I just use regular 32-bit computer graphics colors because it's digital video? Or do I need to stick to NTSC standards (RGB values clamped between 16 and 234 instead of the full 0-255) because everyone's TV uses NTSC colors? Please help!

Encoding: Apparently either MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC or SMPTE VC-1, it doesn't matter. (However, if you can recommend one format over the others for the purposes of rasterising a Flash animation, please let me know. (For example, if one format in particular is more likely to show nasty jagged compression artifacts when processing toon input, or, conversely, if one format compresses solid blocks of color particularly well for a smaller file size given the same running time, let me know about it.) Also, what menacing liscencing issues come with the use of each video format? Detailed instructions on how to sign my soul over to the particular devil who owns each format so that I can actually use any of this glorious new technology would be much appreciated.)

Pixel Shape: Unknown. Please Help. Are Blu-Ray pixels square like on a computer monitor? Or will I need to distort my movie in some way before I export it? NTSC uses rectangular pixels, which is weird and annoying.

Thanks in advance for any helpful replies. Sorry for being a noob and not reading all the old posts in the entire forum before asking this question. I seriously haven't been able to find all of this information together in one place online anywhere, at least not in language that I could understand.