For holiday gift I was thinking of making USB/microSDs full of TV/movies. The intended recipients are not tech savvy types. They would be using windows computers, normal TVs etc.
What kind of file formats/encodings would be good to package the files in? What is safe and universally usable? And which ones are to be avoided? I’d like to guarentee they’ll play without any fooling around with drivers or software.
And I want them to be as small as possible so that I can fit more stuff.
as others have mentioned mp4 with h264 is almost certainly the most compatible. that being said, I transcode everything to hevc if I can’t get it natively, and never have issues. my server literally cannot transcode. it does not have a GPU, and hevc plays natively on every target device I need. even works in browsers these days.
most people will still say h264 is best. but if you’re limited on storage space or want to optimize streaming bitrate hevc works wayyy better than it did even just 1 or 2 years ago.
My old LG SmartTV seems most reliable at playing mkv files but I think mp4 is pretty standard.
mkv and mp4 are the container not the codec. It’s a bit more complicated than just the file extension. You likely have more luck with mkv because of just more consistency as mkv is used more often when the file is meant to be played locally and not streamed.
So, you’re right. But just looking at the container isn’t going to ensure compatibility. The codec is significantly more impactful on whether playback is supported. That’s the part that’s literally taking the compressed video data and decoding it into viewable pixels/frames you see on your screen.
I’ve never downloaded an mkv that wasn’t just standard h264 or h265. So it’s still a good bet. But h265 is less universal and much more CPU intensive for playback (because it has significantly better compression).
I’ve had better luck using MKV for my Samsung TV.
But yea, Mp4 is generally more compatible.
.mp4 with H264: the most universal, and can be compressed to smaller sizes than you might think. Compatibility and compression will still vary depending if you use AAC or opus audio
.webm with VP9 and opus audio: better compression, not as universal. More open-standards based, maybe best balance of compression and compatibility
.mp4 or webm with AV1 and opus audio: probably best compression, also probably less compatibility than VP9, maybe depends what devices they use - good on new computers / phones / Android based TVs, more iffy on a wider or older range of devives. MP4 maybe friendlier than webm on newish Apple devices
The safest format I can think off would probably be mp4, with h264 for video streams and mp3 for audio streams. Unless you go for ancient technology basically anything should be able to open those files.
You could always package them with everything they need to watch, like VLC (which should be able to read most formats anyway). Not clear if they are all on Windows, but perhaps you could include the portable VLC version that doesn’t require an install and make an obvious-named VLC playlist file for them to open.
Oh so you’re the guy from the phishing training
I like this idea. Stick in a portable video player in the usb too. Then you got a working combo all together.
The only file format that pretty much 100% guarantees support on most media hardware is h.264 in MP4 containers. With some encoder tuning you can make them decently small without loss of fidelity; people will notice bad encoding more than they will a slight loss in pixels. I would focus on making a really high quality 720p copy of the shows ans batch encoding them with handbrake (or finding good encoded copies on the usual places)
It’s shocking how little resolution plays into quality. I’ve re-encoded some videos down to 480 and played them on a 65" TV and they look fine.
I can also make videos look terrible by just trying to save space by reducing the quality level of the conversion while retaining high resolution (1080).
