H.264 vs MPEG-4 and Quicktime Plug in vs the Quicktime Player.

Question

I am currently setting up a webpage that will have over 100 videos (30 minute videos)that will be in the quicktime format and ipod format. So I have a few questions about setting up this page and wanted to get someones experienced input on a few things.
I'm setting up the videos with links as there are so many videos. When setting up the page, should I have the entire quicktime player download or just the plug in?
Should I use the H.264 or Mpeg-4 compression setting. I realize that H.264 requires the Quicktime 7 download but I could put a link that sends them to this page, I'm just wondering what the best choice for compression would be.
Do you know of any webpages that have videos that are available for the user to be able to click on the video link and watch the video in quicktime or to choose the ipod
download? I wanted to see how this is set up on one page.

Answer 1

100 videos on one page? I hope you have enough bandwidth to serve all of this data.
I would use "poster" movies that target the QuickTime Player (not the plug-in). No data would download until a viewer clicks a "play" button (a simple image file save as a .mov file). An example of one of my files that uses a poster movie and targets the QuickTime Player. The escape key exits full screen mode.
http://homepage.mac.com/kkirkster/03war/
To set up a page that allows a download you could use a text based link to the same file. Just tell the viewers to right-click (Control-click on a Mac) and save the file from the pop-up menu.
This save you bandwidth and makes creating the page fairly simple (even for 100 files).
I would use MPEG-4 using MPEG-4 video codec instead of H.264 (broader base of possible viewers). I would encode the files at 480X360 dimensions and use the QuickTime playback "Presentation" option to play the files. Big "wow" factor as you can see from my example file.
The page would look something like this:
Name and description of the file as text.
Poster movie (simple image that says Play) sized at 25X30.
Text based link to the "download" version.
Instructions right-click to save (text).
You could make the page using a "three across" (like columns) so the viewer doesn't have to scroll down a long list. Even with 100 linked files the html code would be under 30KB's.