Thanks for the advice it is all helpful.
From what I can tell I have much much lower standards than anyone who is writing online about this stuff. :)
My TV is either 720p or 1020p. Sources disagree I am not sure why and haven’t investigated too deeply; maybe it is situational. I am satisfied with whatever it is. So as I understand 4k would be indistinguishable in any case.
Looking in my reasonably-sized series/film directories I am seeing a lot of files named like [HDTV-720p][AAC 2.0][x264], [SDTV][AAC 2.0][h264].mp4 so your advice on 264s is probably good for me.
Is the h264 or x264 part of the name the bitrate? If so is there a list somewhere of what term corresponds to what bitrate? I also find terms like DivX, HEVC TrueHD 7 1 (is HEVC the bitrate there?), XVID (these ones are very small and actually seem not to be picked up by jellyfin/kodi— it was an older hard to find TV show IIRC it was all I could find).
I just tried to play a file that is [HDTV-1080p][AAC 7.1][x265].mkv which has a pretty big filesize compared to length and it made my TV/device freak out— had to hard reset it. Is it x265 that is so much harder to handle than x264? I don’t find anything else in my collection that includes this.
extremely self aggrandizing analogy to say the least