[Sussex] Encoding video for web publishing

[Al Bennett]

Evening all

Delightful to see you all again last night!  Thanks again to Gavin for the 
talk, I'll play with Qemu.

Anyway, simple question that's no doubt going to get me a bunch of mutually 
exclusive and paradoxical answers, but what's the best way (or, a good way 
at least) to encode a video for shoving online?  I've got a five minute 
promotional DVD that it would be nice to put on a site, encoded in a 
standard kind of way, that could be viewed with a standard issue Windows box 
as well as a penguin box.  I'd like to encode it in a fairly free software 
way if possible (ie, avoiding WMV crap or whatever Microsoft is touting 
now).

I could probably use a Real/Quicktime encoder but I don't think either's 
well enough supported now to warrant using them.

I don't want to stream, just standard HTTP downloads.

Talking about web videos, I just watched some of that XGL stuff, I love that 
thing to make windows into thumbnails, that's cool, but what is the point of 
a transparent movie trailer?!  Unless it's for the Invisible Man, maybe.

Ta!

Al