I have run across devices that will not recognize NTFS usb drives. My car stereo, for one, I have to reformat to fat32 to get it to work.

If you format as NTSF you will forfeit the quick removal ability. I don't know how this will play out while unplugging it from a BluRay player, etc. With Windows, you can right click the icon in the task bar and tell it to eject the media (safely remove), but I don't think you can do that with anything other than Windows based machines. This may lead to corruption of files or an unusable drive.

Also, NTSF will journal changes thus causing more writing to the drive thus shortening the lifespan of the flash drive.

And probably most importantly, if this is going to be how you distribute most of your media to clients, it probably cause more frustration than not. NTSF is not widely compatible- even with older systems of Windows or systems that are not computers (DVD players, Google TV, Smart TV's, etc). You will probably wind up providing alternate methods of viewing media to clients than actually having clients that are capable of watching their videos on NTSF based media.

j razz

When you say distribute ? my worry is how many? to what devices is this media expected to play? is your target audience blind ? i.e., in other words you don't know who they are and you have no control of how they use your media?

Distributing on USB stick will be a pain in the neck...NTFS will be even more pain. And control of what format will be a killer - you could try the outlaw standard mkv! Good Luck!

Regarding playback on smart TVs, if a flash drive behaves the same way as a hard drive then Sony smart TVs will not read NTFS, but Samsung etc. will. Sony smart TVs require FAT32. Sony are about to lose a sale to me because of this.

As for distributing >4GB files to clients, I just researched this yesterday. I opted to format my flash drive as ExFat, which is readable by Vista and later, XP SP2/SP3 with a Microsoft patch, and recent editions of Apple OS X. I was very keen not to run into permissions problems, which might have meant my customer could not open the files, if I had used NTFS.

I just got a Kingston DataTraveller 32GB because it supports USB 3.0 as well as 2.0.

This has been my thought too for some times, especially in how to give Full HD Video quality to my clients, and fully guaranteed they can play those files easily. Here in my area, not many knows Blu-ray as DISC, but HDD media player is more common.

While exFAT is acceptable 'bridge' for addressing 4GB limit issue, doesn't mean it is 100% the same to FAT32. Still not all devices / player capable on reading exFAT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exfat
Look for Disadvantages.

My only way right now is to balance the bitrate so the file size is still less than 4GB. (8Mbps for 1 hour video - at 1080-25p MP4)

Thanks for all the good replies everyone. So we really need to keep the flash drive at FAT32 for good compatibility.

The question is if we have and hour video to render out and need to keep it under 4 gbs could some one post what setting work best or better yet is there a website that has information on this that someone could share with us.

I did some experimenting with video on a flash drive and noticed I could not fast-forward or jump ahead is this just the way it is with flash drives or is there a workaround?

Jerry K

Use common DVD Calculator can work, just set the media size as 4GB, not 4.7GB.

I'm personally customized template settings from Mainconcept AVC/AAC - Internet HD 1080p (Vegas 12), change Variable Bit rate max. 16 Mbps (or 10Mbps for safer), and average 8Mbps.

For jump ahead capability, just like dvd chapters : No. - but for Fast Forward, perhaps depends on the media player.

Unless one is distributing full length BluRays (which in most cases should not be done), there is little need to fret over the 4G milepost.
Pre-2010 Apple devices (and many others) won't play them under any circumstances, even with MP4 64 bit support enabled.

At 4 Mbps bitrate, the math is .5 MB/Sec, so roughly 2.25 hours of good quality 720p on a 4 GB thumb drive.

At 8 Mbps that number is obviously 1 MB/Sec, so just over an hour of good quality 1080i/p on a 4 GB thumb drive.

Note that a standard DVD holds 4.35 GB of program material (not 4.7), so roughly the same thing (8.75% more) as your thumb drive.

The tests Jerry ran some time back confirm my observations that x264 (e.g., Handbrake, AviSynth) is much better below 10 Mbps than either of the AVC encoders in Vegas.

NTFS would limit use on non computers. For computers NTFS is fine unless someone has something really old, like Windows95/98. Other devices probably don't support NTFS.

As for bitrates. Flash drives have transfer speeds in mega bytes (MB) per second and video streams are mega bits (Mb) per second. An 8x difference. There is some overhead and you should leave wiggle room. 5MB/s is a really slow flash drive for example and that can handle quite high bitrate.

USB 2 will deliver anything I can put on it. It is the playback devices that can have problems with AVCHD bitrates and compression tricks.

"Note that a standard DVD holds 4.35 GB of program material (not 4.7)"

A standard DVD holds about 4.7 gigabytes (GB) but computer systems often report sizes in gibibytes (GiB) but incorrectly say GB. (A gigabyte is 10^9 bytes. A gibibyte is 2^30 bytes.) A DVD holds about 4.37 gibibytes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

A 4 GB thumb drive I have has a capacity according to Windows Explorer of 4,005,527,552 bytes or 3.72 GB. (Tut, tut!)

Drive manufacturers always give sizes in GB etc because it is numerically bigger than the GiB equivalent. Computers use GiB because it is quicker to calculate with its binary arithmetic,

[EDITED]

Guess I won't argue with you, Peter. We've gone too far down the road for that.
There were factual errors in my original post, so rather than correct after the fact, I've deleted.

You can't bury your head in the sand about the distinction between GB and GiB. 12 cm DVDs are universally known as 4.7 GB single layer and 8.5 GB dual layer. The capacity is NOT "inflated".

I don't think it helps to merely assert without qualification that a 4.7 GB DVD holds 4.35 (or 4.37) GB.

To make clear the issue about 4.7 GB or 4.700.000.000 B or 4.35 GiB:

Based on Adobe's suggestion, calculate with 4.7 billion Bytes :
http://helpx.adobe.com/encore/using/project-planning.html#bit_budgeting

For more safe, set the final media size to 4.5 billion Bytes of DVD, or, here in this topic, 4GB limited size: as 3.9 or 3.8 billion bytes.

--- Thanks PeterDuke for correction between 'million' and 'billion'

Every bitrate calculator I've tested gets it right, so no need to fret if one doesn't understand the conflicts.

Here's an extensible bitrate calculator I created for Handbrake (equally useful for MPEG-2), that actually includes a separate page to calculate decimal sizes (GB = 10^9) as well as the more commonly accepted binary (GB = 2^30).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20519276/Handbrake%20Bitrate%20Calculator.xls

setiawan3d

I think you mean billion where you say million.

(When I was young, a billion was a million million in Australia and a thousand million in the United States. These days it seems to be a thousand million here as well.)

Opps, sorry... thanks for correction. - fixed above.

musicvid

Truce accepted. I'll see if I can restrain myself when the issue crops up again (as it will). :)

You will notice that my hand-rolled bitrate calculator uses the "correct" legacy decimal and binary terminology (and math) . . .
;?)

One last volley!

If you add up the MB (actually MiB) sizes of the files you see in Windows Explorer, to convert the total to GB (actually GiB) you have to divide by 1024, not 1000.

When this fiasco first started, we had smaller file sizes such that many files would fit on a floppy disk, and file size totals were reported by Windows in KB (actually KiB). The diffference between KB and kilobytes is 1024/1000-1 = 2.4%. Nowadays we talk in GB and TB. The difference with GB is 1024^3/1000^3-1 = 7.3% and TB is 9.95%.

That's correct.

1024x1024 = 1 MB (MiB)
1024x1024x1024 = 1,073,741,824 = 1 GB (GiB)
That's the binary math way (base 2), and makes sense to computers and people who work with them.

The decimal way (base 10) is 1000x1000x1000, which makes sense for non-geeks and humans who want to sell you something.

Now, if some smart drive manufacturer would sell a USB stick with 4294967296 Bytes (wouldn't cost 'em a penny more) and label it 4 GB, we'd be getting somewhere!

Go into your way back machine and hard disks were always spec'd with "binary" MB sizes. At some point, and I cannot remember who, but one of them started specing in decimal values because there drives would have greater capacity than others. All others followed suit with the same change.

Lame thing is that Windows still shows values in the "binary" form. Windows should switch. The decimal form is the one most understandable to the world.

The fact that the actual size will always be a twos complement type integer multiple is just a technicality for those who build the stuff.
-Norman