(Aug 18, 2017, 18:01 pm)Nine Wrote: For me, nothing beats a well encoded and compressed MKV. Especially cause of data costs in my country. I'm always looking for the smallest possible file-size with as little sacrifice to quality as possible.
Don't take this personally, the misconception you are laboring under is common, and this post is for your education (and for that of others reading this thread).
Imagine a cardboard box filled with diamonds and a silver box filled with sand. The lids of the boxes are closed but they are not locked.
A rube, when offered the choice, chooses the silver box, without looking inside, because "silver is worth more than cardboard".
That rube is you.
MKV is a container format. That a file is MKV tells you absolutely nothing about the audio and video content it contains. It tells you nothing about the quality. It tells you nothing about the compression.
The audio and video content can be copied, without any loss of quality or change of compression, from an MKV to an MP4 (or a number of other containers) or vice versa in seconds. There is a tutorial in our tutorial section that shows you how--once you understand that a whole new world of content will be available to you.
The source used to create the encoding is genuinely important--you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The codec, the resolution, and the bitrate are important. Combined, they dictate the file size. x265 (aka HEVC) is the most space-efficient codec currently in general use; but it is not playable on all hardware.
The container, e.g. MKV is insignificant as you can quickly and easily change that yourself without affecting the quality or compression any time you want.
