Putting Showreel on CD-ROM

[beinghuman]

I want to put a five-minute showreel on CD-ROM (Not DVD - I haven't got a burner). The main emphasis is to enable the recipient to view the video on a computer, without doing anything too techie, and I am more concerned with the ease of use than the absolute quality. Ideally I want someone to be able to shove the CD into any old computer and watch the movie.

I am equipped with Edition/Purple (which can output DIF, AVI, MPEG2 and WMV amongst others) and TMPGEncoder (so I can convert files to MPEG1)

The problem I am having is that the original video is 16:9, but I can only seem to retain the correct aspect ratio when I output as AVI (and the data rate is too high at a decent resolution.) or using Elecard.

I want the end-result to be easily played using Windows Media Player, but MPG files only seem to play with the correct aspect ratio using Elecard.

What am I doing wrong?
What (of the umpteen options open to me) should I choose?
Can I burn one CD with an AVI, an MPEG1 and an MPEG2 file and let the user try each one out?

[BJ_M]

media player is bad for that .....

have you though about using quicktime instead ? 1. it plays on just about everything 2. a lot people viewing showreels accually use macs (not that there would be problem playing the QT on a winPC)

you would get max quality in the smallest space (on a unversally accepted format that is) really and still preserve formating ..

on the other problem of aspect ratio -- if you made your film at 720 x 380 (or so) or ~360 x 190 - it should play in the correct aspect ratio