Best export settings for client review.
Pick them for the client's decoder, not for an upload ceiling.

Here the file you upload is the file that plays. The player streams the exact bytes you uploaded, and no transcode happens anywhere in the path. Nothing measures your export against an ingest target, nothing decides a rendition ladder for you, and nothing has an opinion about your bitrate. So the settings question has exactly one variable left in it: can the person you sent it to decode it.

That is a smaller question, and unlike the usual one it has published answers. Browser and platform vendors document which codecs decode where. Nobody documents what a given ingest pipeline will do to your gradient. Work from the documented side.

Read the catches column again, because it is the whole decision. H.264 is the only row without a condition that lives on the client’s machine rather than yours. HEVC on Windows asks a client to buy and install an extension. AV1 in Safari asks for hardware from a specific generation. Those are not reasons never to use them. They are reasons to know the answer before you export, and to default to H.264 when you do not.

Android is worth one sentence if your client reviews on a phone. Google documents H.264 AVC Baseline decoding from Android 3.0, H.264 Main Profile from Android 6.0, HEVC from Android 5.0, and AV1 decoding from Android 10, with encoder and decoder mandatory from Android 14.

This is the part where most guides state something confident and unsourced, so here is the verified position instead. No vendor documents 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC decode in a video element, in either direction. The one primary decoder specification checked, Microsoft’s Media Foundation H.265 decoder, lists its chroma format as 4:2:0 chroma and does not mention 4:2:2 anywhere on the page. MDN states browser support per codec and not per chroma format. Android’s supported formats page does not mention chroma subsampling at all.

So the correct word is undocumented, not unsupported. Our side of it is settled: because we never re-encode, a 10-bit 4:2:2 file uploaded here is stored and served untouched. The browser side is not settled by anyone, and this page will not invent a result for it. For a review copy that has to play on the first click, export 4:2:0 and keep the 4:2:2 file beside it as the download for whoever needs the real thing.

MDN puts the distinction plainly: a media container encapsulates one or more media streams along with metadata, and the format of a media file is defined by several components, including the codecs used and the container format. Describing a video as video/mp4 says nothing about the format of the media inside it, which is why the codecs parameter exists at all.

Practically, that means the MP4 or MOV decision is about who opens the file, not about picture quality. MDN lists MP4 browser compatibility as all browsers, and QuickTime or MOV as only older versions of Safari plus other browsers that supported Apple’s QuickTime plugin. MDN also notes that MP4 is derived from the ISO base media file format, which is itself directly derived from the QuickTime file format, while adding that the two are not quite interchangeable. Your NLE writes MOV because macOS software commonly does. Wrap the review export in MP4.

Audio is the last line and the easiest. Both published tables land in the same place: AAC at 48 kHz. YouTube publishes recommended audio bitrates of 128 kbps mono, 384 kbps stereo and 512 kbps for 5.1. Vimeo publishes AAC-LC at 320 kb/s CBR, 48 kHz. Either will be inaudible against the picture decision you just made.

What the client gets on the other end is the review room: the export playing at its own bitrate, versions of the same film in one place, comments pinned to a timecode, and captions when the film needs them. What you keep is the mastering file, hosted alongside the review copy for download by anyone who needs the actual frames rather than a look at them. See pricing for what the storage side of that costs; Starter is free with 5 GB of hot storage, and views, uploads and viewers are unlimited on every plan, including the free one.

The summary is short enough to keep. Every export preset you inherited was tuned for a step that is not in this path. Delete the ceiling from the decision and what remains is the client, their machine, and the note you are trying to get back.