What is the best way to deliver video online?

Flash is the standard and is most widely installed. It meets all of your criteria, except the last one, that your video be impossible to save to disk, which is not realistic. You do what you can, but you can’t prevent this from happening. If people can watch it, they can copy it.

That’s true, there’s always a backdoor for the determined. I’m guessing the Average Joe won’t know how to pull the Flash file out of cache or whatever, so that’ll be good enough.

Is there a specific codec the source QuickTime files should be in for best quality when converting to Flash?

I don’t know enough about it to recommend codecs, but as a general rule, the better quality you start with, the better quality you’ll end up with. So H.264 or so should give good results. Quality and file-size (and therefore bandwidth) will always be at odds, though. Nothing you can do about that.

Flash. Unless you want to pay some big bucks for secure servers and DRM encoding, I wouldn’t put anything online you don’t intend people to watch and download freely.

Filmmaker here, so I’ve some pretty intense experienced with this kind of thing… any specifics on what you’re doing?sounds like porn perhaps.

Not porn. My NDA prohibits me from discussing, but I’m designing the launch site for a new venture from a very well-known American TV show host.

If it’s promotional, then they won’t care who sees their video as long as other sites can’t leech bandwidth by direct linking.

Or, if they’re really hot shit, then they’ve got a YouTube partner account and will stand to make cash per view anyway.

I’m sure you thought of this though.

No direct linking/embed function will be available, correct you are.

what is the link to get flash I could use it myself

Oooh ooh! Jerry Springer Online?