Bitrate for TV play

[akkers]

I want to encode a long-ish video into MP4, copy it to USB and then play it on a LED tv.

What bitrate should I encode the mp4 so that most tvs will cope with it?

[LigH.de]

Certainly below the maximum read speed of your USB device.

Apart from that: MP4 is a container format. But you will be interested in attributes of content streams. To be compatible, you may prefer MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) as video format. I guess that most TV sets will support High Profile @ Level 4.1 for DVB-S compatible combinations of resolutions and frame rates. Bitrates are a less important constraint, provided the material can be read fast enough from the device.

[akkers]

I once encoded a MP4 (H264) video at 20mb/s. The Sony TV struggled to play it. I re-encoded it a10Mb/s and the TV was ok with it. So was that the USB not keeping up with data rate?

[akkers]

Here is an interesting thing that cropped up the other day. I encoded 5m of video from my Sony A7 iii (50p) into MP4 H.264 file; copied to a USB stick and plaued it fine on my Sony Bravia tv; no problems.
I took the same usb and plugged it into the LG tv and it played it buttery smooth. I was over-impressed and thought motion interpolation was turned. So I stopped play, checked for interpolation which was OFF anyway. I then played it again and the clip was stuttery/jittery as ever.
I took the usb back to the sony and played it there and it was showing signs of slight stutter.
What was going on there? Is this usb getting hot and slowing down on data rate or tvs getting tired of pulling in data?

[mail2tom]

To eliminate guesswork check the technical specifications for playback that the TV is capable of. If you no longer have the manual for the TV look it up online to find out what audio and video codecs the TV "expects" the file to be. There is usually a section in the manual that will give a breakdown by container and codec. If you are encoding your own video you can match up your encoding effort to equal what the TV expects.

[akkers]

Thanks mail2tom. Yes but if the TV plays the footage correctly most of the time but then struggles sometimes - this indicates usb problem or data transfer issue.

[johns0]

You can test a usb read rate,just copy the video back to your computer,if it copies at a steady rate of at least 20mB a sec then its the bitrate that the tv is struggling with.

[jagabo]

Note that video bitrates are normally specified in bits per second. Whereas drive transfer rates are normally specified in Bytes per second. So a USB drive reading at 20 MegaBytes per second represents a video bitrate of 160 Megabits per second.

Another thing to consider is that MediaInfo and other programs report the average bitrate. A video with 8000 kbps average may have much higher peaks if encoded with a variable bitrate.