Scottee,

I recently posted a few videos on the internet from home-made videos and dvd. What is best to use is a controvertial issue among the video community, but MPEG2 is the compressed video format used by the vast majority, and you will find no difference between PC and Mac users as far as the WinMediaPlayer is concerned.
Now, your second point is about how you actually produce the video and what software you should use. Again, any recent video-edit software (eg. Adobe Premier, Pinnacle, etc) will allow you to edit and render your video and then produce an output tailored for different uses (on tape, on dvd, e-mail, or -as our case- for the internet). Most advanced sw will allow you the output in a STREAM format, which is commonly readable by most users.

Hope this has been of help.

Amelio