Need to burn video to mpg to use in player but iMovie only accepts mp4

Our Samsung television, our Roku media player, and our Sony basic DVD player all accept .mp4 (plus others). That's mp4 video with aac audio. The video can have either XVID/mp4 codec, or h264 which is a newer codec. Our TV must be about 4 years old now. All of our devices accept files on a USB drive.

I don't use iMovie but I would think it could do plain mp4 since that format has been around for at least 10 years.

What you need to do is research what exact formats your particular player supports. Look at the user manual. Sometimes there are surprises. It surprised me that Roku does not support AVI since AVI has been around for well over 10 years and is very widely spread, particularly on the PC side of things.

It really depends upon the codecs supported by the player. Frankly I haven't seen "mpeg" as a format required by a player in many years. Is this a really old DVD player? I get the impression it is if you can't use a USB drive with it.

The codecs are the internal coding of the video and audio streams in the media package. In a few cases I have found that changing the extension on a file name has resulted in a file being playable as long as the player can work with the codec formats inside.