I have been compressing for web sucessfully with QT creating .mov.
I use IMA 4:1 for audio
And Animation Codec for video
Can anyone tell me the Windows eqivilant? avi, wmv? I dont know which is the best.
And which codecs are the best within those formats for audio and video.
There's a few formats you might want to consider: Quicktime 6 now offers mpg4 -- installing the pro version you will not see the mpg4 audio inside of VV3, but you will see the video codec. And winmedia & real both work. Personally I like winmedia, but I think it's a matter of preference -- in my opinion Real gives the center focus of your video more attention, with an almost blurred background, while winmedia can give you problems with background pixilation and/or crawl at lower, web bitrates. With any of these formats I think you might have to do some fine tuning if you're trying to match the quicktime animation compression -- maybe the winmedia screen capture compression will work for you.
Microsoft Video 1 is a totally outdated codec. It can't produce a perfect frame in most cases, no matter how much bandwidth you throw at it. It can only assign 8 colors to every 16 pixels and only compresses up to 16-bit video. It also looks VERY blocky, particularly at low data rates. Cinepak produces ugly stair-step artifacts due to its motion prediction. Indeo 3.2 can produce color bleeding and strange dithering.
Personally, for web distribution, I use Windows Media v8 using the command-line, 2-pass encoder. (Not the Windows Media Encoder v7.1.)