How many folks out there are willing to use RealPlayer though? Lots of folks have gotten fed up with Real's intrusiveness and have sworn them off for life. I don't know if 9 is any friendly and politer than 8 was, but after trying 8 for a a couple of weeks i'll never install it again and have no interest in looking at 9.

Version 8 included the tklbell.exe program that would communicate with RealNetwork's server and pop up ads and offers every time the player was used. It also tracked which offers you viewed so that it could target you better. You could delete the program, but it would reinstall and activate itself automatically the next time the player was launched. I finally found a way to manually hack and disable this feature, but the point is that the feature shouldn't have been intrusive like that to begin with. Even after disabling tklbell.exe, just running the player would sign me up for RealNetwork's email newsletters again even after i had opted out. Fortunately i registered a throw-away email address when i installed the player so that i could avoid getting the emails.

I think if you go with Real you'll probably get a good number of visitors who won't view the video.

In the Mac world, REAL and Quicktime rule. Quicktime can't produce good web vid in any codec at low bitrates.
FWIW, in the 'professionals' world, you are absolutely right. But in the consumer world, nearly everyone has REAL. REAL is barely second to Windows media player in installations, and REAL has a greater subscription rate than does WM. CNN, HDTV, Discovery, A&E are all REAL providers, and REAL is doing exceptionally well.
On a personal level, you are absolutely correct, and I have had many issues with REAL, even though we've consulted to them several times in the past.
On a market level, you are not correct. REAL is very much a real player in this biz, no pun intended. Particularly on the Mac side.

Thanks for the replies.
Spot, I have tried to render to QT, but the quality was not good at all. The file I'm rendering to is 320 x 240 and is about 3.5 minutes long. I have to remember that most of the people that will be looking at it are on dial up, so I can't make it to large. QT produced some large files and didn't look that good. I don't know if I’m making some bad setting or not. I get better quality with WMV9 at 2.4 mb file size than I do with QT at more than twice that. I'm waiting on a reply from the person that will be hosting the video to see what formats they can take.
Spot, you mentioned that Mac users can view WMV9 now, what do they have to do to be able to view it? Thanks again for your help.

Any opinions? comments?
Thanks Mark.

I used to encode only to Real. Now I mostly do Quicktime. Up until about a year ago I was only on a dial up so I can have sympathy with the quality vs. dl time issues. I also needed to encode to something that was cross platform, windows media just didn't cut it. Real was the only option for myself, and many others, in the past several years. QT was normally better quality but the file sizes were just too huge. Sorrenson entered into the picture and that changed. The "streaming" element is not as fast as Real but you can still get good results. The other option is to encode to QT than to Flash. If you are having problems with the actual encode try the Sorrenson Squeeze app or ProCoder. For what you seem to want to do Squeeze will work fine, ProcCoder does a lot more but also costs a lot more. Also keep in mind that you can lower audio quality to maintain a higher image quality or do multi format encoding that will adjust quality automaticly during streaming, in which case you would end up with a larger upload file but what matters is the end users download.

Why not make it easy...encode to MPEG 1...widows media plays the files and quicktime player plays the files- good for both worlds...

Sadly, if you're going for small file sizes, MPEG-1 has about the worst image quality/file size ratio of any of the common formats used these days. If you don't mind having substantially larger files (for example, on CD distribution instead of download) then MPEG-1 can perform reasonably well and plays in almost any player on almost any system. If downloading is a requirement then it's a poor choice.

Chien,
I find your comments a bit misleading. MPEG 1 does not have the worst quality of the current formats. I am not sure what encoder you are using. A .wmv file, while it is true will be a smaller file- but not by much when you attempt to match the quality to MPEG 1. I send :30 spots to my clients in MPEG 1 all the time because they are both Mac and PC compatible. The file size for a the :30 MPEG 1 is 6 megs, the file size for a compatible .wmv will be 4.8 megs and will have a few more artifacts than the MPEG 1- BUT- few Macs will be able to read the format- they must have the Mac version of the Windows Media Player. Realistically, you would have to post either a Real Video file and offer a link to get the Real Player- and that is a hassle, or post a file for PC as .wmv file and then post a 6 meg Quick Time file for Mac. So post 11 megs for the 2 files OR post 6 megs for the MPEG 1 file-AND THE MPEG FILE will be much cleaner- in my humble opinion, than the other formats.