Best conversion for "low res/qual" QT files?

I have some educational QT videos that i saved i'd like to put on the kids Nanos.

The files aren't high quality in the first place - but watchable. I'm talking a 53mb file for 27 minutes as a QT file.

I was just trying out Streamclip to convert them to MPEG4 - it defaults to 50% quality. I actually thought that since it already was a low quality, i'd want to do it at 100%?

BUT, the resulting MPEG4 file was 160mb. I"m running another one at the default to see the size - but dang, i like the original file sizes much better.

SOOO, am i going about this right? Or should i just drop them in iTunes as QT and then let it convert them? I'm multi-tasking and burning MPEG2 disks from EyeTV at the moment, so maybe that is part of my problem with "format overload"

Thanks for any tips or helps.

 

I"m still playing with this, but the iTunes conversion creates the smallest file size.

So, i'm going to go with that.... i don't get why it has to double in size though. It's doable to convert them on my computer - the kids eMac, not so much....