@lina @hakui @forcedinductionretard @s Ningen/yer, listen up here, I’ll explain it once. Sharing videos in MP4 format is fine, but it has several major drawbacks.

Browsers, except appleshit, were never updated for x265 playback, and x264 is hella old. x264 is a good codec, but it’s old and inefficient for sharing short videos. Nextgen codecs like HEVC (H.265) and VP9 allow better compression and quality per megabyte of space ratio. Basically you can fit ≈1.4…1.7 times more video frames in the same disk space than with old generation codecs like H.264 (VP8, Theora…).

H.264, being an old codec, is not quite adapted to playback over the internet, and it has that large chunk of metadata called the MOOV atom, which takes additional space in the container. It some times can grow up to 2…3 MiB, which for a short video is a lot of facilitated overhead.

MP4 has limited support for Opus audio codec in the built-in browser players. (Though chromeshit can play it, as far as I remember.) Are you pursuing good stuff so much as to use chromeshit? No? Then let’s continue. FFmpeg still offers Opus in MP4 as an experimental feature. Opus is the best free codec nowadays, you don’t get the same quality with AAC (even FDK AAC), and, needlessly to say, with MP3. FFmpeg wiki has a page dedicated to the audio codecs, you can find a comparison there.

Unlike with .webp, there’s a good reason to use .webm and vp9, since we can’t have x265 and opus in .mp4. (Theoretically speaking, we can, but that won’t be playable, unless you download the file by hand and play it on your machine.)