

The only file format that pretty much 100% guarantees support on most media hardware is h.264 in MP4 containers. With some encoder tuning you can make them decently small without loss of fidelity; people will notice bad encoding more than they will a slight loss in pixels. I would focus on making a really high quality 720p copy of the shows ans batch encoding them with handbrake (or finding good encoded copies on the usual places)











Yup. Close to lossless 480 will always look infinitely better than a poorly encoded 720/1080/4k. Compression blocks ruin images INSTANTLY.
Its why NTSC analog tv was always just Enough.