I distribute my "home movies" in three video formats:
RealVideo. This is a very common video format that has players for both PCs and Macs. I use the older G2 format, but probably will move to RealVideo8 soon, so you should probably update your real player. It is distributed in streaming and non-streaming format. If you have a fast internet connection, you can view the movie as it is downloaded into your computer right after you click on the link; this is call real time playing. If you are receiving the movie at a slow rate (say less than 128 Kbps), the image quality will be bad. In that case I recommend downloading the movie first via the Non-Streaming Link. You save the whole file first to your computer (i.e. have to wait without watching the movie while is downloading), and then you can view the movie with you real player at full quality.
MPEG1. This is a very popular video format that works in practically ALL computers. It yields VHS-quality movies, and it is what Video-CDs use. On the counter side, the files are very big. You can use this format, if you have disk space and have a good internet connection. Again, you will have to wait for the whole file to download before playing it. Windows Media Player and some other players, will sometimes start playing the file before completely downloading it (you can see this by the progress bar on the bottom); if the video is jerky, pause it until it is fully downloaded.
Windows Media: I am testing this one out, it is not final. On the good side, there is a version of windows media player for the Mac and the PCs.
LINUX NOTES: There is a RealPlayer8 for Linux, but I sometimes is jerky. I recommend downloading the MPG and using 'xmms' to view it.
In terms of quality I find the RealVideo is a tiny bit better than Windows Media. The advantage of Windows Media is that the player is not plagued with ads or reminders to update; it really bothers me.