I need to convert my HD home videos which are currently in MOV (I think it is MPEG4 codec in an MOV container), but I am not sure what format and settings I should use to maintain the best quality. Could I just swap the file out of the MOV container to an MP4 container? Forgive me if this is entirely wrong, I am a newbie at this stuff.

The device I will play them on (LG BD390) will play a lot of different stuff, but not MOV files.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

I thought this was going to be a topic about kinds of media, and I was going to suggest 16 mm film! :p

On a more serious note, I vaguely recall this particular question coming up a long time ago. The gist of it was that there is/should be a fairly transferable route to go between mov and mp4 w/o transcoding the whole thing, iirc. You just have to find the software that can do it. Maybe Quicktime? If not, trying digging up some video encoding/transcoding shareware. It's not that you want to transcode material, but oftentimes this kind of software includes the option of just switching the "container" w/o having to re-encode the video, itself. That is essentially what you are asking to do, when you want to swap mov to mp4.

IMO

MOV is a big no no. It's not widely supported format unless on PCs and Macs.

MP4 / h264 should be your best choice because most devices and computers have support for it.

MKV is a good format with compression but you have to be careful because not all players support it but it can have a lot of metadata and it's becoming more popular.