Came into some movies files encoded 265. Some would not play on my ten-year-old Samsung. So that’s a limitation of h265. Are there others?
Normally with any movie file I use handbrake to encode h264 with high quality settings.
So for H265 content that is unsupported by Samsung…should I encode the files a notch lower in Handbrake (h.264)?
Another question I’ve never asked in my life: can you update firmware on a smart tv? maybe that will update it?
thanks for any insight.
The TV must be on the end not supporting h.265, it became popular fast after that. h.265 is ubiquitous for a long time now and considered available everywhere. The quality improvements over h.264 are so vast it’s hard to avoid nowadays.
A firmware update probably wont change much, because the playback is usually a hardware feature. If you really, really don’t want to invest in a new TV look into a cheap hardware dongle, like a FireTV stick. Depends on the setup.
Otherwise transcoding to h.264 it is.
I’m open to both. I appreciate the informative reply it’s nice to know what my options are.
A/V isnt really my strongest suit but wouldnt VP9 be somewhat in between these two?
It is similarly old enough (as well as open source) to be considered a ‘you can use this everywhere without needing to worry about compatibility’ while being newer/better than H.264.. if not quite boasting the efficiency of H.265 (HEVC).
Or thats what I think I’ve gathered.
EDIt. Just double checked and H.265 was released in July 2013 and VP9 was June 2013. 
never got serious about digitizing my music and movies all those years until very recently.
*PS–music is done. goodbye jewel cases.
*PSS–movies more complicated; have not come up with a plan but really tempted to high-quality encode and convert to .iso
*PSSS–in handbrake V9 variants are available in the Matroska (mkv) tab..interesting.
Thanks for the reply
The problem is that VP8 and VP9 were heavily threatened by software patent lawsuits. So commercial vendors wouldn’t touch it with a ten feet pole†. Making playback of these codecs available was a huge legal - and therefore financial - risk.
Eventually these threats turned out be mostly hollow, but it gave a huge head-start to h.265 over VP9. But all of that doesn’t matter, it has to have decoding support in hardware, and if the TV of that era lacks h.265 it surely wont support VP9.
†Except mostly Google. They did stick to their guns and carried it through. Credit where credit is due.
the law of unintended consequences.
…and nowadays we have YouTube encoding almost everything in VP9 or AV1, which almost no old laptop/notebook can hardware-decode… 
Was setting up an EOS notebook today and wanted to check if VAAPI worked out, and couldn’t find a H.264-encoded video on Youtube quickly. Even those that claimed being some kind of H.264 testfiles came over in AV1 or VP9. The old notebook was stressing its Celeron out… playback almost impossible.
This is a thing
( I opt for this over some of the other similar alternatives due to its features and its source being available on github. )
Certainly interesting, but what will happen? Can’t I watch those videos anymore or does it somehow force YouTube to stream in H.264 instead?
The description is a little unclear, even on GitHub. Tells about blocking everywhere.
This, depending on your settings.
Now that sounds really useful, willtry. Thanks for mentioning!
“enhanced-h264ify is a fork of well-known h264ify extension for Firefox/Chrome which blocks VP8/VP9 codecs on YouTube, so that you can use H264 only. This may be useful because there are lots of devices on the market which support H264 hardware decoding and do not support VP8/VP9.”
interesting. nice find.
Hm. Just installed it, “Stats for nerds” still tells me “AVC1” and CPU load ~7 (on a 2-core Celeron). And no sound anymore.
EDIT: After uninstalling it again, and restarting Firefox, still no sound. Had to shutdown, switch off & restart the notebook before I got sound again.
interesting until the last 4 words…ruh roh.
hate when that stuff happens/glad yr normal now
This didn’t let me sleep… After a few more uninstalls/reinstalls and also blocking 60fps video, it looks like it works after all. “Stats for nerds” tells me 24/25/30 fps and “AVC1” (which is H.264), CPUs are still quite maxed out, load ~4–7.
I’ll keep playing with this for a while. Would be nice to be able to watch a YT video on this super-low-end “typewriter only” notebook once in a while…
Still wonder what the cause was. This thing is almost freshly installed (few hours ago), just put the libva-intel-driver on it to get VAAPI accel.
H.264 and H.265 standards carry profiles, which represent a standard of support. So it remains possible (maybe) your TV can play H.265, but perhaps the videos you tried were encoded with a profile that exceeded what it supports.
For H.265, the most basic and widely supported profile is called “Main”. The standard carries many more higher level profiles, most of them using “Main” with something tacked on, like “Main 10” or “Main 4:2:2”. For testing purposes, avoid those.
In Handbrake, you might try encoding x265 to the Main profile, and perhaps no larger than 1920x1080 (in case it’s bigger) and see if that plays. Stick with common AAC or MP3 audio in a MOV or MP4 container. If it still doesn’t work, then I’d essentially say that confirms it doesn’t support H.265.
Rip them (DVD or Blu-Ray) with makemkv, the key is here, you can select the audio/subtitles tracks you want to keep.
You can use Handbrake to reduce the size of the movie (x264 is a safe choice for encoding).
so far 264 and mp2 audio with the output being an mpg is working well.
this is interesting i.e. a collection of mkvs. I am exploring preserving the vob and a host of stuff, in fact I will start a new thread with the hopes of gauging opinion i.e. ‘what would you do?’ thank you