On 16 Aug 2010, at 04:02, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

...

My underling thing, if anyone can make other suggestions, is that my camera broke, and I had to get one in a hurry, and didn't really know what to look for. I wound up with a fairly good Sanyo 1080p camera and video recorder that's super light, and not too expensive. The problem is that its videos are MP4s, which are definitely not ready to put on a web site, and I know nothing about transcoding. My previous camera took acceptable .avi videos, which had worked with most folks browsers.  The MP4s are huge and in a weakly supported format.

MP4 is a much better container format than .avi.

I previously discussed this a little in July's "viewing .m4v files with totem" thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org/msg103363.html

Use the `mplayer -identify` command given there to determine the codec of your video.

Stroller.