[Mike Velte]

H264 requires QT player 7.+ to play. Windows Media Video might require an upgraded player install. Both require the user to download and install something…will your audience do that?

Flash requires the least effort from the audience…worse case is for them to click OK to update the browser plug-in. The quality of all three is quite close…I like Flash.
Creating good quality web video requires either dozens of hours experimenting or read one of dozens of books on the subject or even better option is

Internet Killed the Video Star by Aharon Rabinowitz
A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

Available at the Cow Store. Highly recommend it.

[Mike Velte]

You need to select the video and audio compression settings in VirtualDub, like Microsoft Video 1.
A better bet is to use Premiere Elements 4, it will handle most any highly compressed format.
Premiere Pro is designed to use DV and HDV source material coming from a prosumer or professional camcorder.

If you will download GSpot (free) it will give you the particulars of your video file.

[Mike Velte]

Premiere Elements 4 is designed to edit many of these redux codecs.

[Mike Velte]

Export from the Adobe Media Encoder as Mpeg 2 DVD at 5100 kbps VBR. By default Premiere will export the video and audio separately.

[Mike Velte]

AVI is not a codec, but an architecture that supports a bunch of 3rd party codecs as well as Microsoft’s DV codecs. There are a large number of apps to do a conversion, VirtualDub is free.

[Mike Velte]

My experience with reversed field order is that the video looks strobed during motion or camera panning but just fine when thing are still.
Low bitrate causes mosquito noises and blurring during motion.
Would be nice if we could all SEE what we are discussing. Can you email me a frame grab? velte AT coxDOTnet

[Mike Velte]

[Sjoerd Bil] “black lines to the sides of the screen”

In Encore’s menu window, can you stretch the background a bit to fill the screen. Suspect something got lost between PS and Encore regarding pixel aspect ratio.

[Mike Velte]

Most encoding apps have a “Quality” setting, basically a compromise between smooth motion and sharp images, experiment with a middle setting and a maximum setting.

[Mike Velte]

You did not mention what your “Maximum” bitrate nor your “Quality” setting was, but I suspect that the high motion content of your event precludes the encoder saving very many bits during the still scenes (minimum bitrate) to help during the high motion (Maximum bitrate). This leaves you with pretty much a 4.4 mbps action video, a recipe for what you are seeing.
Suggest either 2 disc set at 8 mbps cbr or use a dual layer disc.

[Mike Velte]

Describe “poor”.
How long is your movie?
What application did you use…also what settings? How much data on the DVD disc?