Formats and Hosting
 

I have about a 4 minute video that needs to be hosted properly. Although youtube can suck it, if anybody's interested you can watch it here basking in all of its pixelated glory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4hHJ3R2lEw.

I'm wondering what the best quality format settings I could use to downconvert it to a small enough (100mb) file that can be posted somewhere appropriate.

Any help on either would be awesome, thanks.

H.264 is best and you hosted at MediaFire.com

You didn't mention what resolution you want to post it at - if you want it under 100Mb that means your max data rate for a 4 minute video is about 3.2 megabits (3200000/8 = 400kb/second X 240 seconds = 96Mb). At that data rate HD resolutions are probably out, even 1280x720 needs at least 5-6Mb/sec to look good. Also, if you want it to stream for most broadband users you'll need to keep it well under 1.5Mb/sec...

For SD resolutions try 640x480 or 640x360 (for 16x9), h.264 @ 900kb/second, AAC audio @ 128kbs - this will give you a ~30Mb file which should look really good, stream for most broadband, and as a bonus be compatible with iPod/iPhones.

There's a ton of hosting options out there, most of the free ones are really annoying for the end user though because they are basically trying to make money on ads... but they are easy. If you're tech savvy at all my current preferred option is Amazon S3 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261). Once you sign up you pay $0.15/month per GB of storage, with no minimum... so your 30mb file would cost essentially nothing to store. Then you pay $0.20/Gb for bandwidth... so 1000 downloads of your 30Mb video would cost you $0.60. It's very fast and scales to whatever you need.