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 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).
Really depends on the content. Real life, recorded for TV, where there’s not a ton of in focus detail? Yea it doesn’t matter much. Documentary, videogame, or other content where they try to keep everything in focus? It can make a huge difference.
Though I tend to watch things on a high quality computer monitor, not a tv across the room, so details stand out a lot more in the first place.
This is why motion smoothing is turned on by default on most 4K TVs. It’s the only way most people can see any difference.
Yup. Close to lossless 480 will always look infinitely better than a poorly encoded 720/1080/4k. Compression blocks ruin images INSTANTLY.
Its why NTSC analog tv was always just Enough.