Re: compression for web

For example, most of my clients are medium to large businesses and educational or government institutions. And because of their target audience I assume that they have broaband, and further, that broadband has increased bandwidth these days. So where I used to provide a 320x240, 15 frame, 300kbs video, I now generally compress a 480x360 or 480x270 (although that's another subject), 700kbs, 29.97 video.
Flash looks great *if* you encode with ON2VP6, H.264 looks great (and Adobe recently included H.264 into their Flash spec, Windows Media 9 looks good. ON2 VP^ needs a recent Flash player, H.264 needs QuickTime 7 or higher, WMV9 will play on slightly older machines, but looks slightly older too. :-)
We often provide a WMV and H.264, sometimes an ON2VP6 and one or both of the others as options.
We still don't know what your settings are. When you say it looks horrible, we have no way of knowing why unless you tell us what you're doing.
Ed