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>
> Well, I'm a newb in video, but it was suggested to me by someone who uses
> it, so I wanted to try.

Mplayer comes with a program called mencoder, which will do your video encoding. Its a bit more "hands on" but it is excellent once you learn it.

>
> 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.

IIRC, isnt MP4 just a container? what are the video codecs and audio codecs in the file? If they are 264 and mp3, you should be able to use HTML5 for them natively.

MP4 is actually gaining alot of support in many OSes due to it being part of the HTML5 spec.