i have just completed a nice little nine-minute film, an instructional thing, and it came out pretty well, i think. (this despite it being made on an acer aspire one, on which 0.75 worked perfectly.) anyway, i now seek to export it in a fashion that will retain the quality i see when i play it in kdenlive.

when i went to do so, the numerous possibilities demonstrated to me how little i know about digital video formats! the film is dv ntsc, nothing terribly fancy. i sent it out as the first choice in the mped-4 list, but the result (at least as played by mplayer) made it seem as if it were about 160x120, so pixellated nd awful it was at 720x480.

so, then, what would be the best formats for a portable file of high quality? file size is a consideration but not paramount.

thanks for help with this silly newbie question -- i tried to find some reference as to the multutide of mpeg-4 choices (also mpeg-2), but if such exists it escaped me.

"portable file of high quality" is too vague. Do you want to archive or distribute? Please do not say both - choose just one for now. Next, how? (e.g., optical disc, internet-download, internet-web, DV tape, etc.) Also, who/what should be able to play it back?

Once you know what you want to do the options become much narrower. For example, if you output to optical disc, you have a size limit - choose near the maximum allowable bitrate for the medium's standard and then reduce if needed to fit the movie duration onto the medium based on its capacity.