My parent’s Samsung smart TV’s built in media player had been pretty impressive.  It played avi and mkv files without any issue but lately I saw a format which it could not play.  Videos are now being encoded in H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec).  It is much more efficient than the most common standard H.264   With this newer standard, both TVs and media players won’t have the hardware to support it.  Support of H.265 is something you need to look for when buying a new TV, android box or media player.

To get H.265 video to play in older hardware, you can transcode it using a open-source program like Handbrake.  Transcoding to H.264 will make it more compatible sacrificing a larger file size.

Update: H.265 is the standard used with 4K video so any 4K smart TV or 4k compatible media player should natively play H.265 encoded video files.