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.
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).