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I recently acquired a Mini DV camcorder.

The plan is to make short video clips of encounters with wildlife (mostly reptiles and amphibians) for the web.
I can use Linux to eat the DV via firewire and kino to edit the dv.

I haven't tested the DV ripping yet as I need both a head cleaner (cheap) and a replacement DV cable (also cheap) but what I want to do after edting -

transcode and resize to:

Ogg Theora, mp4, flash flv

The plan is to use html 5 with ogg and mp4 so that any html5 capable browser (right now just firefox and safari) will just play it, with flash as a fall back for IE etc.

I can use ffmpeg2theora for the creation of theora.
I can probably use ffmpeg for the creation of the mp4 but I think I'll use a Windows PC with QuickTime Pro just because I don't want to be sued for not using software that licenses the patent from the MPEG group, and I suspect using QuickTime is less likely to have headaches where it doesn't work - can QuickTime Pro do a straight transcode / resize from a dv file to mp4 that safari can play?

I haven't investigated how to do the flv yet - but I believe there are free linux tools.

Next question is about sizing -

I shot some video with consumer digital camera that produced a motion jpeg in an avi container with a 4:3 aspect ratio.
When I ran ffmpeg2theora on the avi and told it to resize to 400 width, it produced a 400x300 video, but the sound was screwed.

I then used kino to import the motion jpeg to dv, edited the clip, and saved as dv.
Then when I used ffmpeg2theora on the result, the sound was good but the aspect ratio had changed - instead of 400x300 I got 400x266. I'm guessing that is because dv standard is 720x480 so kino on import had to change the aspect ratio, is that correct?

If so, then going from MiniDV to kino shouldn't be a problem. However, I read on some blog that it is best to keep both dimensions as a multiple of 16 when resizing video. Why is that, and is it really necessary?

Thanks for suggestions.