In my case, planar mapping is what I seem to prefer. Although I do have spheres and things like that where other types of mappings are better, almost all of my cases seem to use planar mapping, or whatever MED uses.

As to the video, that depends. It seems as if I don't have a lot of codecs and often can't view videos because of it, uncompressed (but zipped up (the bzip2 algorithm in Winzip works very well with videos - my videos from my animations compress better than 2000:1 in some cases)) is my best method at the moment. If otherwise, a series of many screenshots would be useful.