HD video on usb flash drive

[Stephen Mann]

I’ve never tried it, but how would the client view it? My Sony HDTV has a USB port but it is only for viewing photos from a camera. If he plans to view it on the PC, you might want to provide a lower bitrate MP4 file because USB sticks may not be able to deliver HD speed.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Norman Black]

As usual, it all depends on what is going to play the file. Encode for that playback device capabilities.

I would not worry about USB drive data speed. 20Mbps video is only 2.5MBps data rate. 2.5 megabytes per second is a pretty sedate data speed. It may be possible to buy something insanely slow these days, but I doubt it. Even really cheap drives these days should do 10MB per second.

Of course this says nothing about the devices USB port. Computers are no worries. A TV or Blu-ray. It is conceivable they may not have the speed to saturate the USB 2 bus. But saturating the USB bus means something like 30MB per second.

[David Shirey]

There are a lot of variables to consider when asking this question. What is the client planning on watching the file from? What’s the length of the video? What sort of quality needs to be achieved in this “HD” file?

From my personal experience, clients that have wanted a file they can “watch on their computers” have been pleased with a Mainconcept AVC MP4 file. 720p at 7mbps. That’s a nice middle of the road HD format that if the project isn’t very long, can be uploaded to YouTube, put on usb drives, sent to friends via file transfer websites, easily played on tablets, smart tv’s and all sorts of devices.

If this is a 2 hour wedding, regardless of the large size of the USB drive you’ve bought, you’ll hit the 4gb file limit of FAT32. You can format the drive for NTFS to allow a larger file, but then it’s not going to play if you plug it into something like a smart tv or playstation3.

Also are you still using mpeg2 for blu-rays? AVC h264 files can provide the same quality at a lower bitrate, and takes advantage of GPU acceleration when rendering if you’ve got that capability.

As for USB drive speeds, they aren’t really rated by class like sdhc cards are but places like newegg.com normally list the read and write speeds of cards, or if they don’t you can often check the user comments. Be careful because really cheap sticks may have read speeds lower than your file’s bitrate, but if the client is watching from a pc just recommend they copy it over to their hard drive anyway.

[Tyson Onaga]

fwiw … I have put a 1920×1080 mp4 on a usb flash and it played fine on a Samsung HDTV.

[David Shirey]

That’s a good point, you can absolutely do 1080i or full 1080p as an mp4 at a higher bitrate. The only tradeoff would be hitting that 4gb file limit sooner and you may have trouble playing that back on some cell phones or older tablets, and maybe 6+ year old pc’s. Always best to talk to the client and cater your video specifically to their needs. There’s definitely no one best solution when it comes to distributing video.

[Nigel O’neill]

I am interested to see where this discussion goes because I got asked last year to consider delivering a 2+ hour concert on a USB stick, but the fat32 limitation plus the lack of menus or a means of navigation seems to kibosh the whole idea.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Tyson Onaga]

Found this:
https://www.ntfs.com/quest22.htm

Have no idea if it actually works though.

As far as navigating, you might try putting an ISO image on the USB drive and using a tool like Virtual Clone Drive to make it appear as an optical disc. Of course, this will only work on a computer, not a TV.