.avi file too slow to load from web page cue

After 3 days of trying to cipher help tutorials and pages, I finally have my web page showing exactly the cue I want to click for a movie--i.e., highlighted text and no reference image. When the cue is clicked, a new window opens promptly and it then takes 2 minutes to get the (30 second) movie loaded and playing. Everything's jake except for 2 minutes it appears to be stuck. As the cues are on a book length how-to page, I prefer to have no image files directly imbedded for reasons of encumbering the page (??) with ultimately 50 or more cues to movies of half to 3 minutes. Here is the markup I'm using for the first file I'm trying to make work:

<a href="http://www.tigeroutdoor.com/Tiger_snaps/movies/short-pant-scrapes.AVI">bare-legged</a>

I may be bumping into the edges of what's wrong, but I'm having a harder time seeing it than a blind cat in the bottom of a dumpster. The avi files I'm using are straight from the camera. Do they need to be massaged by iMovie (which I don't have on my laptop G4 PowerPC with Tiger 10.4.1.) The file opens quickly on my machine. Is it compression? Streaming? Wrong extension? Need to embed Quicktime in the how-to page header markup? Of course I ain't any savvy on this stuff, so please understand your dog probably gets it better than I do. Thanks for your kind and patient help.