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.
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.
The 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.
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.
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 bitrate