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)