Best Video Compression for the web???

I have read a number of discussions about which codec to use to compress video for the web and I’ve done my own tests and bar the longer encode time, which is not a problem to me, H.264 seems to come out as the best. I can get a superb quality, small enough for a quick download EXCEPT… this website needs to be friendly to the PC community.
What do you all suggest I do?
Go with lower quality MPEG-4 or Sorenson 3 and have my work look “not so good” or use awesome H.264 and provide a link to download the codec, which busy PC people will probably not bother to do.
This is my dilemma.
Thanks in advance for any advice.

I love the results I get when using H.264. Even low data rate files look good (even when I display them double size).
But it requires your page visitors have QuickTime 7 installed to view your QT files.
QuickTime 7 is nearly a year old and most of your Mac viewers will have it installed. It is also "bundled" with the iTunes software download that many PC users have installed.
H.264 is the only codec that requires version 7. Any other choice can be played using older versions of QuickTime.
As much as I like H.264 its installed viewer base doesn't reflect the visitors system settings for Web work. If your crowd is savvy to QuickTime they will not mind the download to upgrade. If you use tracking software on your visitors you'll be able to see if they hang around for the download.
MPEG-4 may be a better Web use choice.

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