Device compatibility
Also known as: hardware compatibility, playback on devices
Whether a file plays on the hardware people actually own, which spans a far wider range than any single test machine suggests.
Updated
What it means
The audience is not one device. A recent phone, a five-year-old laptop, a smart television and a tablet somebody has not updated all have different decoders and different limits. The oldest device in the audience sets the floor for everybody.
Age decides more than brand. A device from three years ago supports what was common three years ago, and nothing about it will ever change about that.
It is the practical half of Codec support. One is about which formats exist and the other is about who can actually open them on the devices they have today.
How it works in practice
Delivering to the floor is the safe approach. H.264 in an MP4 at 1080p plays on essentially everything with a screen, and the quality lost is smaller than the audience gained.
Resolution matters as much as codec. A 4K video file can exceed what an older device will decode even when the codec is supported, so a 1080p version is the fallback that works.
Testing on one machine proves very little. A laptop with a recent processor is the best case rather than the typical one, and a modest phone is the test that actually matters.
What to watch out for
Televisions are the worst offenders. A smart television from a few years ago has a fixed decoder and no way to add one, and a file it declines is simply not watchable there.
Partial support is worse than none. A device that decodes a format in software plays it badly rather than refusing, which produces Stutter and a drained battery instead of a clear failure.
The result is read as the sender's fault. Somebody whose phone cannot open a file concludes that the file is broken, which is why a Perceived quality problem is frequently a compatibility one.
How RawClip handles it
The delivered file targets the widest range deliberately: a standard codec, a common container and a resolution that older hardware handles. A second lower-resolution version exists for the same reason, which is that no single encode can suit everything at once.