Be careful. As others have said mp4 and mkv are container formats and
this is what is associated with the extension. It's more important in
the what can play the video decision.
The compression (or not) comes from the codec, but again some codecs can
do both compressed (lossy ) and uncompressed (lossless)
Note also just to confuse folk, there is an MPEG4 codec, which I thought
for a while was what mp4 used.
Unfortunately none of this is simple and ultimately the only way I found
to settle on what I wanted for my video collection was try a number of
containers and compressions and evaluate which gave me the best overall
result over many different types of film and tv program. (Plus side that
took a few weeks with bottles of wine and the better half helping
evaluate the results...)
Then it was the case of what simplified the various sourcing processes
and finally - compromise, which I think is where you're at here.
To be honest, with the number of streaming services around these days
I'm more selective and don't keep as many broadcast items as I used to.
- It costs me less to subscribe to 3 or 4 services than it does to build
and run a file server for a 10 year period. The added advantage is that
many of the things I recorded in 1080 x 720 or whatever are now
streamable in full HD and even with the bitrate that comes down the line
to me it's better than my 10 year old recordings.
For more info you could do worse than these two:
raw info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats
or for a more readable piece:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/all-you-need-to-know-about-video-codecs-containers-and-compression/
On 10/07/2022 17:40, Computing wrote:
Oh, I was lead to believe that .mp4 was a lossy format, where as .mkv
is not.
That is what I was trying to avoid
Martin
On 09/07/2022 23:01, David Cantrell wrote:
As far as I know conversion to mp4 is just changing the container
format, there’s no recompression.
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