At work we have a creative group which produces videos that our sales team uses for powerpoint decks, client presentations, etc. The creative group is mac-based so they produce quicktime files which are unplayable on a Windows PC unless you install Quicktime (which we don't, by default). Quicktime files also don't work very well when you try to embed them into a powerpoint presentation.
We're tired of dealing with video compatibility issues so we want to tell the creative group to produce videos in a more compatible format, but I'm not sure what that should be. I don't really want to tell them to produce windows media video files because that isn't the most compatible format outside Windows. Is there a generic format that Windows 7 can play without the need for any additional software? I was thinking h264 or something similar, but had a tough time finding a definitive list of what Windows supports. What I'm really asking is what would be the best video codec and container that's compatible with Windows 7 out of the box and also compatible with the largest number of other systems?