Best video format for web?

[janlafata]

I have some white water rafting videos that I want to upload to my blog. They weren't created by me, but by someone I know. However, short of using properties or media info, it's still hard sometimes for a rookie like me to figure out 1. What kind of video I have and 2. what is the best format to upload it in. I'm also still a little stumped on exactly what to tweak in my video converter.

Here's an example of my project....1. I had been converting some of the videos to mp4's in Blogger, however for some reason now many videos recently started not appearing in a 16:9 format. (I think it's a Blogger thing) In fact they came out almost full screen with about a half inch or so black around the whole thing. Would I be better off if I ran it through my video converter? As a test I converted some mp4's to AVI, then uploaded them and they came out better than the first batch. So now I'm thinking that besides sticking with conversion to an avi, then an upload with that same video, I should try to look for some settings changes in the video converter to get everything as close to 16:9 or widescreen as I can. I would also like to add that, even though working with the AVI's got me the aspect ratio I wanted, they did not look as crisp as MP4's

[Krispy Kritter]

There is a "best" setting. For the most part, it's just whatever works for you. Secondary, would be the file size, especially if you are paying for hosting/data usage.

I've not used "Blogger", so I can't comment on it's use. But if you post the mediainfo of a source file and the output file(s), I'm sure someone can figure out what's wrong, and likely suggest a fix or a better application.