Like, video media is 99% of the time a .mkv, so I'm assuming thats the most popular. But is x264 or x265 better. Like, I don't want to waste storage or wait too long before I can watch something, so what is the best storage to quality size?

And eBooks, .pdf .mobi .epub .azw3 wtf I'm confused

Audiobooks, there are m4b, and mp3

There is one series of books that I can only find .azw3 on Libgen, and nothing on F-Droid even opens that file format.

Yea I think I don't know what I'm doing.

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[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Video container types (.mkv, .mp4) are different from encoding types (x264, 265)

For both, the “best” or “better” is gonna depend on your use case. .mkv is nice because they bundle multiple video tracks, audio tracks, and subtitle tracks all into one file, but .mp4 is pretty much guaranteed to be playable on anything (although the number of devices that don’t support .mkv is pretty small at this point)

x265 is nice because the quality:file size ratio is much better than x264, but again, compatibility is an issue because x265 is still somewhat new, so older devices probably won’t support it.

As you can probably tell, I prefer .mkv + x265 whenever possible, but that’s only because every device I own can play them

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

Same with audiobooks. The “classic” way is to have several MP3 files - 1 for each chapter. This allows them to be played even on dumb MP3 players.

However, the M4B format allows for more modern AAC and HE-AAC encoding and adds metadata such as chapters directly into the file. This results in the whole audiobook being contained in just one single file and with much better compression than MP3. But you’ll need a compatible player to listen to them.

(I’ve transcoded most of my audiobooks to M4B as a collection of 320kbps Stereo MP3s doesn’t make sense for just spoken content.)