That is great info thank you I have been bothered by this issue for years and never able to find any useful insight into solving it. Because everyone who care about audio has fancier equipment of course. It makes sense I will try to select stereo instead of surround. I just use the TV speakers.
I was typing up a reply when you posted this. And as I mentioned, it so happened I tried to play a x265 file and my TV/device did crazy things I had never seen before requiring a hard reset. Now that I see how to look at the filenames I notice that >80% of my existing collection is x264 or h264. So I think I will do as you say and stick to this.
Thanks for the advice it is all helpful.
From what I can tell I have much much lower standards than anyone who is writing online about this stuff. :)
My TV is either 720p or 1020p. Sources disagree I am not sure why and haven’t investigated too deeply; maybe it is situational. I am satisfied with whatever it is. So as I understand 4k would be indistinguishable in any case.
Looking in my reasonably-sized series/film directories I am seeing a lot of files named like [HDTV-720p][AAC 2.0][x264], [SDTV][AAC 2.0][h264].mp4 so your advice on 264s is probably good for me.
Is the h264 or x264 part of the name the bitrate? If so is there a list somewhere of what term corresponds to what bitrate? I also find terms like DivX, HEVC TrueHD 7 1 (is HEVC the bitrate there?), XVID (these ones are very small and actually seem not to be picked up by jellyfin/kodi— it was an older hard to find TV show IIRC it was all I could find).
I just tried to play a file that is [HDTV-1080p][AAC 7.1][x265].mkv which has a pretty big filesize compared to length and it made my TV/device freak out— had to hard reset it. Is it x265 that is so much harder to handle than x264? I don’t find anything else in my collection that includes this.
I can only listen to podcasts and I really dislike the trend of everything being videos. Especially when it’s about how to do some technical thing and you have to watch someone using a terminal or doing a physical repair… I literally CANNOT. I can’t attend to the visuals. Just zone out. I mostly listen to TV/movies. When I was a kid you could get TV stations on the radio at night and I was totally happy to just listen to them.
So you enjoy your half of the media and I’ll enjoy my half. :)
broke what
the first thing you need to understand about the law is the concept of jurisdiction.
there is no meaningful way of asking a question about the law without specifying jurisdictions you are or may be subject to. which means you need to figure that out in the first place. or ask for help figuring it out.
there is no law of any kind which applies to everyone in all situations.
Thank you so much this is exactly what I needed to know!!
You should post it somewhere people can find it like trash guides or smthg. Surely I am not the only person who doesnt have all this knowledge to start with.