How to send AVI videos back to family who are using PCs?

I just got a Mac Pro and love it. I take lots of videos of the kids with my Canon digital camera. The video's native format is *.avi. The movies are usually way too big to send via email. When I used to have my PC, I would fire up Windows Movie Maker and it did a great job of reducing the *.avi to a more manageable 2 or 3MB.

How do I do this with my Mac? I have tried QuickTime Pro but it doesn't seem to be very friendly at this. I could be wrong here, but so far when I open a video and choose "Export" I get a very confusing dialog. I can choose "Movie to AVI" but then when I click "Options" - this is where it gets confusing. All I want to do is compress my movie to 3MB or less. Under Options, I have to choose between Video and Audio, and then a Cinepak or other blah blah compressor for Video and the same for Audio. I have no idea whether my parents will be able to view the movie on their PC.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Are there any simple apps out there that accomplish what I am wanting to do?

You could just drag it into iMovie and export it using the "email" export option...

Another option would be to just upload the movie to something like YouTube and let them grab it from there.

Problem is that I use Gmail. Dragging into iMovie and exporting would create an *.mov file which wouldn't be of much use to Mom & Dad. Remember Dad has trouble finding the Start button sometimes...

It boggles my mind that there is no easy to use utility to convert video? I heard all this talk about how easy Mac is for pictures and videos. It seems like Mac is easy to use for Videos if you live in an all Mac world - but only about 5% of the population does. I would think someone would come up with a video utility to help Mac switchers stay in touch with their PC relatives...

I use freeware iSquint to compress my videos. http://www.isquint.org/

A .mov file would play with QuickTime. Maybe your mom and dad could download QuickTime for Windows?

I like the Youtube Idea if you live far away from them.

You can share it with LimeWire. Give the filename something really weird, like "asdfnsdvbnwervjunwernv.avi" so no one else finds it.
Then have your family either search for the file name or connect directly to your IP.

http://www.ffmpegx.com/
That will convert/compress your video as much as you like if you still want to do the email attachment thing.