Which format to stream.

Sorry if this is in the wrong place as I haven't got a clue.
I have a Samsung UE55F8000 TV.
When I download a movie which format is best to stream to my TV.
The choices I have are, MP4, MP4 (H264), MKV. Which of these would give me the best quality picture.
When I download some movies they are in MPEG4 (H264) the funny thing is some play fine and some don't play at all. So I want to convert them.
Which brings me back to my question above.
If I need to convert an MPEG4 (H264). Which format would be the best to convert it to.
I know that MPEG4 (H264 ) is a larger file...and takes forever and a day to convert to.
Hope anyone can follow this.
Thanks for any replies

[atc98092]

MP4 and MKV are containers, and by themselves tell you nothing about the quality of the media they contain. Both containers can hold H.264 video, so there's no issue there. H.264 video most likely will look better than the same video in MPEG-2, but that's not a given. The MP4 container will most likely hold MP4 video, but can also contain H.264. The MKV container can hold almost any video and audio codec.

What is important is the resolution and bitrate of the video within the container. And unless the download site provides that information, you would have to download it first then examine the file with FFMPEG or something like MediaInfo.

Your TV supports both containers, as well as TS/M2TS, MPG, and actually a large number of other containers. I tried to attach a manual I downloaded, but it's too large and the download URL isn't formatted in a way I can embed it here, so here's the raw link. Notice that the brackets are messing with the full hyperlink. You'll need to copy the entire line, not just click on the portion that the forum has made into a hyperlink.

https://org.downloadcenter.samsung.com/ ... 105554609/[ENG]FPDVBEUF-1.004-0401.pdf&OriginYN=N

So overall, I would choose the H.264 version, and it can be in the MP4 or MKV container. As long as the audio is supported, it should play without any transcoding or conversion. If the audio isn't supported, Serviio will transcode it on the fly, which doesn't take much processing power for audio.

That's excellent.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I will have a look at the link.
Again Thanks.