[MPlayer-users] mencoder best web video codec

[marco at metm.org]

Hello all, 

I want to put some of my dv footage (captured with kino) on the web.
I have a general question about video codecs, which I am asking here, as
opposed to directly to the lists for the appropriate codecs, because
mencoder is a tool which can use many different codecs.  

I would like to present my movies online in a format which allows the
smallest download, best quality, is free of strange patents, and visible
on most computers.  This is alot to ask I know, but with mencoder and
with some amazing free-codecs I am most of the way there.

I used mencoder with the -lavc to make some really nice websized
encodings of my dv footage.  I encoded both mpeg4 and h263p in 2 pass
encoding with an mp3 audio track on another pass (I would use ogg but I
think this is even less portable :().  

Unfortunately I cannot read these movies on a mac (they actually crashed
the machine), and I tried to view them on the windows boxes at school and
at some friends but it never seems to work.  On linux they are perfect.
I wonder what have people used to make accessible web videos?  mpeg1?
what about audio? 

Can someone working only on Linux encode footage for the web which will
be accessible to a reasonable number of computer users? and be amazing
quality?

Thanks for any ideas.

-- 
Marco