I am new to WME. I have watched some tutorials a read some articles about it, so I have a vauge idea on how it works. Here is my situation: My cousin has asked me to take a 1 min avi clip with audio and prepare it for a web page she is setting up for a client. This clip will be viewed using windows media player. My cousin has never put any video clips on a web page before, so this will kinda be a learning experience for the both of us.
Is there any specific setting in WME that you recommend or any certain steps to preparing for this? How should I save this when I give her the the finished avi after using WME, cd disk? Will she be able to take it from that and put it on her web page, ok? I don't know anything about the setup of web pages, this will all be a first for me. All info appreciated.

The main issue is the data rate you select. The wizard provides many choices and the first decision is whether or not you want dial up users to be able to view it. If so you probably won't like the result, unless it's mostly talking head type material with little change from frame to frame. For hi-speed users the typical data rate seen most often is 300 kbps. This, and all other data rates, are a combination of the video and audio portions of the encoding. The lower the audio rate the more is left for video, so if the audio isn't critical try a lower data rate. But for starters I'd suggest you simply select something like "cable/DSL" and whatever option there is at or just under 300 kbps. My encoder is tied up right now so I can't refresh my memory on the exact bit rate options.
Once you have a finished .wmv file put it on CD or email it to her. A one-minute file won't likely exceed 2 MB. It goes up on the web server like any other file and can be accessed by a simple URL link which will pop up the viewer's Windows Media Player, or with a little easily available code, can be made to play in an embedded viewer. For code that works in Firefox and Explorer she could grab the code from one of my pages at www.digicorps.com/gallery. Any of the linked video pages, via "view source" will allow her to copy and paste, if she is sufficiently familiar with HTML.

David Hurdon

For my web site samples I've been using a resolution of 320x240 with a video bit rate of at least 256 Kbps and audio of ~32 Kbps. This will work well for users with DSL or cable modem connections; for dial-up users you'd use lower settings. Save the output file with a .WMV extension and copy it to any media which is large enough (CD would be fine), then have your cousin upload it to her web server and that's about it.

Here's an example from my web site. Note that the URL includes the file name with the WMV extension:

http://www.videomem.com/weddings/samples/rose_jeff.wmv

you should be able to zip it up, maybe upload it to your web server, and have her download it from there... maybe even email the zip file, if it's not too big for the email enclosure limits... better yet: http://www.yousendit.com/

you can experiment with things like cutting the frame rate way down, using mono audio, etc., to shrink the file size/bitrate... just make sure the frame rate is a multiple of the original 29.97, there should be some presets within the encoder that allow for that... wm9 is the codec to use.