Video formats for cross-platform projects

I’m curious to know what the developers or ELAN users recommend as a good working format for video files for cross-platform use in ELAN. I note that no general recommendations are given by the ELAN team (right?).

My questions are:

What is the best container, codec, and perhaps bitrate for video for cross-platform use?

Is it better to demux video and audio streams into separate files? (I have found this to fix some issues)

The background is:

I’m working on a project with a small team who use a variety of platforms (Mac 10.11, 10.10, Windows 7, 8, 10). We are working on a corpus of materials with a couple of hundred hours of video. The videos typically range from 30 to 60 minutes in length. We have work divided into several stages such that one person hands off work to another at a certain point. I’m finding that what works for one, does not work for all. Playback may be reliable for one person but broken for another.

Dear Tom,
We know this is has been an issue, and we find that mpeg2 files tend to work better on Windows machines than on OSX. For mp4, it is the other way around.
Recently, after some extensive testing, I found that mp4 files which are encoded in I-frame only, tend to work well on both OSX and Windows. This encoding can be achieved by using either ffmpeg or handbrake. A preset file for use with Handbrake can be found here
That file also contains an example for ffmpeg.

Typically, we extract a wav file from the video and keep the audio in the video file as well.
Hopefully this information will guide you in the right direction. If you have any further questions, please let me know.