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.
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.