View Single Post
Old 10th August 2018, 07:40   #2  |  Link
Ghitulescu
Registered User
 
Ghitulescu's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Germany
Posts: 5,769
I reapt what I said to countless similar questions:

observe the standards (DVD, BD etc, AKA VOB, M2TS and stuff). Only this way you can save the content for future generations.

Remember the AVI? While still playable, not all players can cope with all its variants.
Remember Real Media? WMV? The same, less for RM/RMVB.
DivX, xVid?
MKV was a good starting point, yet it appears to fail, since no hardware player (standalone) can use even basic functionality (all players revolves around SMP8xxx chipsets and last time I checked they could not use the subtitles embedded in MKV only the external ones). Why it failed? Because it was in a continuous change in specs, at least up to the point the manufacturers said stop the crap and implemented the unchanged features.

Standrad files are kept for one generation - one could put unmodified VCD MODs on a DVD (not 100% compliant, because of GOP issue), unmodified VOBs on BD, and so on, observing of course the structure of the new medium (MODs must be repacked as VOBs, VOBs as M2TS etc).

A HTPC, with a custom software, may overcome all these issues and may provide the mental safety that nothing can change, yet new software versions of the players may drop old features and old formats favoring the newly ones - a regular John has no control upon that software unless he writes it. Standard formats will never be removed.

With the exception of some idiotic devices (usually meant to be this way, intentionally), all media from all devices observe these standards, too, so that one can take the movies from a camcorder and make directly a BD, maybe with some remuxing (not recoding).

Space is not a problem - time should be. Saving 1GB (0.1% of a normal HDD nowadays) at the expensive of 5-12 hours, multiplied by 200 movies, plus the electricity costs, is not worth the trouble.

I would use today M2TS (container) with the unmodified content (MPEG2, MPEG4) instead of any other alternative, like MP4 (restricted in audio codecs diversity), or MKV (multiple streams possible issues with some players).
__________________
Born in the USB (not USA)
Ghitulescu is offline   Reply With Quote