Which video format for viewing on MAC and PC?
My System: Intel iMAC, retina 4k, late 2015; running on El Capitan OS X 10.11.6.
My Objective: I have MP4 videos stored on my HD which plays well on my MAC. I would also like to play those videos on my friend's Windows PC during my visit to his home. It makes sense to store them on an USB so that all my videos are on a single storage device which can be used on both MAC and PC.
My Issue: I have not been able to find an article in Apple Support to address this specific objective. The closest I found are:
How can i change a video clip format that will play on a PC to play on my MAC
Re: How do I format external Seagate 4 tb HD "ExFAT"? from NTFS
The first thread may be out-of-date considering the reply was made in 2013. So after considering the more recent second thread (QUOTE "..Set the format to....ExFAT if you wish to use it with both Mac (10.6 or later) and Windows...MBR is an old Windows partition scheme which can be used on both Mac and Windows" UNQUOTE), I have taken the following steps:
(1) Reformatted an 33MB USB using Disk Utility 15.0 into exFAT and Master Boot Record;
(2) Moved all my MP4 videos by dragging them from HD to the reformatted USB (i.e. those MP4 files are no longer on my HD).
In Finder, the MP4 files on the USB still carry the extension "mp4" but the icons in the "Preview Column" indicate "M4V" files. Now as I tried to watch those videos on QT 10.4 (and other 3rd party video players on my MAC), the videos failed to be played on all of those players on my MAC.
My Questions: (A) Is there a way to store mp4 files on an external device which can be viewed on both MAC (without running Windows natively) and PC? (B) I also tried to drag the mp4/m4v(??) files on the USB back to the HD but the same problem persists - any solution to bring those videos back to their original MAC-viewable state?
iMac, Upgraded from 10.6.8 to El Capitan
