Streaming Video

The most important is bit rate as far as file size.  Try and keep it below 1000.  Physical size I wouldn't go much larger than 640 X 480.  The FPS no  higher than 30.  It's best to experiment for your own video to see what gives you the best ratio of speed to load vs quality.    

Smugmug has some basic info on this  http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84563-video-details-and-specs and http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84569-how-should-i-convert-and-format-a-video-for-upload-

Video is a lot more complex than it appears and I wouldn't suggest hosting on your own site.  Let's say your server is in NY, when somebody in CA views your site, the video has to travel cross country or what if somebody is in the UK?  

Your much better off getting your video on a CDN or using Youtube or Vimeo as they have all of this figured out.  A CDN will allow you to upload once, and the network (Content Delivery Network) will copy the file to all of their servers which could be located throughout the country or world.  If somebody is in NY, they see the video via  a NY server that is close by.

You can upload your video to google drive, dropbox and MS OneDrive (Skydrive) and embed your video from there as well. Those can essentially be free CDN for you as well as youtube/vimeo.  Plus, you don't have to worry about optimizing your video as they will do it for you.

Otherwise, there are paid CDN's
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ 
https://flowplayer.org/  (both a player and now a CDN)

There are a lot of CDN options.  Your visitors will have a much better experience if you use one.  Hosting videos on your own is not a great idea.

I was going to use a CDN actually. Just so many options I don't know the best one.