I have recently been offering hd on usb thumb drive delivery option in addition to dvd for my theatrical events. But I ran into a problem with my current project. When I went to test it on my Sony BDP-3500 bluray player with usb port it choked on the video.

I encoded it on the mac via Compressor with iphone 1080p preset that is mp4 H264 @ variable bitrate of 10k .

I encoded 3 minute segment and it played without an issue. The full video is a little over 2hrs so it appears that length has an effect. I split the video in half and it did much better but if I used the fast forward too much it could cause it to freeze.

I thought usb would be more widely accepted and easier to create than Bluray but how can I use usb thumb drives with any confidence if I'm tech savvy with a relatively new media player and I'm having issues.

I know there are a number of people who use usb but I never hear any compatible issues. In my case it seems like 1080p is close to the limit of my media player's decoder. I looked up the manual but there is no guidance to bitrate or resolution.

Hi Pete,

I supply my wedding clients with a USB with 1080 Video files. I also usually use the VBR compression of 10K which seems a good compromise between length and quality. You will though need to restrict the length of your clips to about 50 minutes to avoid problems with file sizes. I tend to keep mine to a maximum of 45 minutes or even less to coincide with suitable content changes. Files should run consecutively if you use numerical and character naming e.g. 001 Act One, 002 Act Two, etc.

Roger

Forgot to add that formatting the USB to fat32 will give the widest compatibility but your file sizes will need to be kept below 4Gb, which shouldn't be a great problem with 10K compression.

Roger

I was able to play a commercial bluray movie ripped to a mkv at a much higher bitrate using another software 1080p/24p/h264. For some reason movies created with Compressor are more taxing to decode.

Online search yielded similar troubles with Sony bluray players but no solutions. I'm going try encoding with another software.

Hi Pete,

Exfat doesn't have a file size limit, but a lot of hardware won't read exfat but will read fat32 which is more universally compatible.

Roger

Hi Pete,

Exfat doesn't have a file size limit, but a lot of hardware won't read exfat but will read fat32 which is more universally compatible.

Roger
In general you might be right just in this case it doesn't seem to the problem.

I downloaded Handbrake and used the fast decode option with lower bitrate fixed the issue.