This quesiton might drive you all nuts, but I m wondering if Quicktime is just better than mpeg1. My test shows that Quicktime file ended up bigger than MPEG1 when I set the bitrate the same.

Right now my QT movie is doing about 8.6MB/30sec, where MPEG1 does about 5.3 megabytes/30 sec. Each of my life tend to last around 3 min, so QT would add about 19.8 MB to the file. Is this because I am doing something wrong? I matched file size of QT to MPEG and movie looks so bad. I'm doing this because I saw this amazing QT movie made by someone on this board and I thought "Wow, QT is gonna be so great!"

His video was doing about .94MB/sec. I have no idea how such a file was able to stream to my computer (on cable modem). 1 meg * 8 = 8 megabits??

You are not asking the correct question. QuickTime (as AVI) is not
a compression format. It is simply a container format that supports
multiple CODECs (COmpressor / DECompressor). MPEG1 and 2
ARE codecs AND formats. In theory you could have MPEG1 or
2 streams INSIDE AVI/QuickTime files.

One of the best (but also expensive) QuickTime codecs is the
Sorenson codec. Most movie trailers etc. are encoded with that
codec.

I personally do not have any experience on QuickTime codecs
so cannot point you to a "good" one.

Hope this cleared some things up though!

Thanks Rob,

I didn't realize QT is like AVI. When I tried to encode stuff, I got choice like H.286 which is windows codec. That got me confused. Now I am working on using .RA because it turned out that It can create faily good looking video of 512x340 @ 1000kbits/s for 3.5meb/30seconds.

But problem is that when I play back the .ra file from computer, video skipps and freezes until it catches up with audio. Can't figure out why...