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.
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.
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.
what has been the location of improvement?
compatibility with devices. it wasn’t long ago that many cheap TVs and such didn’t support hevc and required h264, or work on browsers, etc.
so if it’s better than 1 or 2 years ago, what about devices purchased 2 or 3 years ago?
I meant that devices purchased within the past 8 years or so have hevc decoding now. so even your grandmother who’s known for holding on to old tech most likely has something that will work with it.
just in the past year or two I’ve found that those devices have become common enough for incompatibility to be extremely rare. and the software support is far better within that timeline too. firefox had issues with it as of a few years ago, but it’s become pretty seamless on most browsers and devices.
HEVC is a bad idea, as hardware support is still missing on some devices and certain common software such as Windows Media Player cannot play it without a microtransaction. These are easy fixes for anyone with the desire to solve them, but it sounds like that is not who OP is gifting to. I literally had someone ask me last week what to do with a video file WMP could not play and it mildly blew my brain.
Depends haevily on the manufacturer.
But for me it was pretty much everything in mp4 (and newer probably also can do mkv) in H.264.I’d avoid H.265, with the exception for very new and fancy tvs (usually OLEDs and higher end TVs from >2018.
Never do AV1.Also keep in mind, that not every audio-codec has support.
Try to go stereo or (I think AC3).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)
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).
If the TV doesnt understand the container, it could be in mpeg-2 and it wouldnt run.
So better be safe and use mp4.
I’ve found x265 is pretty universally supported in 2025. I’ve switched all of my downloads for Plex over to 265 and none of my users have reported issues. My users are not particularly tech savvy and have a ton of diversity in their devices from cheap ass smart TVs, to consoles, to various mobile devices and computers.
I think it’s fairly safe to start getting everything in 265 and the space savings is significant. Very easy to get 4K HDR rips that look great for only 5-7 GB. HD rips can easily be 1-2 GB.
Include VLC if you need a player, but again I’ve found nearly everything plays 265 these days. It’s not nearly the compatibility issue it was years ago.
MP4 container, 265 video (w/ HDR10 layer if appropriate), Dolby digital audio (w/ Atmos track if appropriate) is what I usually look for these days for a balance of compatibility and quality.
I’ve found x265 is pretty universally supported in 2025
Keep in mind, that most folks may still have their 30-40" TVs from the early 2010s…
They can do H.265 but will seriously struggle with a higher bitrateThe default Windows player does not support h265 without an additional charge. Cheap devices such as my parents’ Hisense from 4 years ago also stutter badly on playback of h265, even though they aren’t high bitrate (1.5GB for 1.5hr movie, hardly a large video). These are additional barriers that can be avoided by using h264.
The default Windows player does not support h265 without an additional charge
H265 is a common video compression codec, charging for it is a strange way to encourage users to stay within their ecosystem.
The first time I got that popup I immediately gave up using that garbage software ever again, but casual PC users don’t quite have the same self respect.
I don’t disagree with anything you said; but my point still stands. It’s nearly universally supported these days, even on cheap ass TVs.
For windows users I either point them to Plex so they can hop on my server, MPC-HC (from Klite codec pack), or VLC. In OPs case I’d just include VLC along with the video files.
My Plex users use a multitude of shitty TVs and old consoles, and they report no issues back to me. It’s not the same compatibility situation as it was years ago.
.mpreg has the best compression to quality ratio.
This is a hilarious autocorrect
Autocorrect? Just run an mpegging compression protocol on any lossless video file to get an .mpreg file.
think you meant to say mpeg. look at your actual comment.
Nah they’re right.
.mpreg uses a sophisticated algorithm to identify repeated sections of the compressed file and retain only one of each part with a list of pointers to where they go. The single repeated sections are stored inside the end of the file and during the decompression process they’re inflated and passed out of the end of the file (or removed from the file by cutting into the bitstream at their stored location where they’re inflating).
It’s a new technology that has made traditional file creation kind of obsolete. In about a decade there will probably only be mpreg.
Just put a portable copy of vlc on there well
mp4 for compatibility, literally click and play on 99% of devices, most OSes come preloaded with software to play mp4 files.
mkv for functionality, it’s a much better format in general but as you mentioned, they’re not tech savvy and it is possible that they may not gave VLC or any other 3rd party video player so they may face issues, I think it’d wiser to give them mp4 files.
And for encoding, you can either encode in H.265 or AV1, both are amazing, they’ll help you save almost half of your storage, since they’re way better than H.264, the quality will be indistinguishable but the files sizes will be halved.
