I don't like big screen sizes. There's nothing I can see at 720x540 that i cannot see at 360x270. Remember that the screen area of the first one is 4 times the area of the second one, and that the file will also become about 4 times as large. You will rule out a lot of people with you big-screen fetish. Use resolutions of around 240 px wide for home video till 480 px wide for demoreels ..

I always use the 2-pass VBR converter (except for rough tests). It takes the most time, but gives the best performance. I use a keyframe for every 2 seconds (50 frames) for video with little motion up to a keyframe every half second (10 frames) for video with a lot of motion. Bitrate for the video: 200 - 1000 kbps, again depending on the amount of motion in the source material. Just try it and if it looks good, try a lower bitrate until the quality starts to decline. My audio is set to 32, 64 or 96 kbps mp3. 32 for just speech, 96 for cool music. Again, listen if the sound starts to loose crispness. Remember that a byte is not a bit ! A byte is 8 bits ..