better quailty

hi have have made an animation in blender 2.49b and renderd in blender 2.55. i was wondering how to get better video quality when rendering animations.

anyway here is the link to my video. sorry you have to download it but i havent uploaded it at places like youtube for you to watch it here http://www.2shared.com/video/rS5UK_54/super_ball_2.html

Are you rendering direct to a movie format? What settings are you using?

Everything is very dark. I think, you need to work on lights in the scene.

Use a more modern video codec like xvid or H264. Your video look extremely pixelated when I play it in vlc
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Render/Output_Formats#Codec

ive kept every thing as default accept the the file formatt which i have set to mpg