Flash Drives have too much capacity.
I started making a flash drive mixtape. I put 90 minutes of music on there. I put a 4k feature film on there. I put a video game on there. I stuck a webcomic on there. I made a webpage for it to all fit together.
It's less than 3GB. If I went 1080p instead, I think I could get it down to CD-R size.
I still have 29 GB free on this flash drive.
This is so silly.
Okay, mixtape thoughts.
A well compressed 4k film is 2GB. A well compressed 1080 film is 600MB. If i go for maximal compatibility and quality, rather than optimal size (and storage is currently cheap enough that I can), a 4k film comes in around 5GB in h265, and a 1080 film comes in around 3 in h264. You can go bigger, obviously, but if it was a born digital file there isnt an obvious benefit (analog noise does not compress well, so stuff shot on 8 or 16mm needs a little more bandwidth or DNR.)
(I've never tried to encode 4k in 264... 
Not going to get sidetracked right now. )
Music in flac is 8-10 MB per song, but 320k mp3s are sufficient, and 96k opus is fucking fine and even if I have the Space why would I burn it up on stuff no one is going to notice?? If you can tell the difference between 320k mp3s and a flac file in your car 1) no you can't 2) you spent too much money on your car's dac 3) when is it ever going to matter?
So, at 4k I can fit 6 pretty high bitrate films on a $3 flash drives. 16 if I work for it.
At 1080... between 10 and 40, de9ejdijg on bitrate.
6 films is at the high end of what I'd want to include in a collection, honestly. 10ish hours of video is a huge expectation to put on someone. We watch 1 - 2 movies a month. 3 - 6 months of films in a mixtape is not the move.
40 is ridiculous. That's not a curated experience, it's a pile of junk. (I mean, it can absolutely be a curated experience, but it moves in to different territory. That's a classroom curriculum or a museum exhibit, not a mixtape.)
That's 4.5 weeks of uninterrupted audio.
So optical media, right?
A DVD-R holds 4.7 GB and costs, what, 20 cents? Less in bulk?
Doing optical media mixtapes gives me enough room for a 90-minute album, two hours of video, a game, and a website to introduce and contextualize it all, for 20 cents.
Add a case and a booklet for less than a dollar, and I still come in way under the price of USB drives.
But then folks have to have optical drives.
@ajroach42 Optical media is potentially a little safer, too. I might be wrong, but I think it's a little harder to spread malware and viruses via CD-R or DVD-R than with a USB drive. Even though Sony got caught essentially distributing a rootkit on some CDs back in the early aughts, the user had to run and install the exe -- it wasn't automatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
@mediageek the sony root kit absolutely was automatic, but wouldn't work anymore becuase autoexec is gone.
@ajroach42 Ah ha! Forgot about that. And because I haven't been a regular Windoze user for a dozen years, I didn't realize autoexec was gone.