Thanks for the kind words. The site really isn't meant to be much of a community site at this point. So I sort of wanted them to blend into the background as much as possible, but still be readable.
You are right though that it is a bit hard to see. If they desire more community interaction in the future I will probably change it to a more readable color.
Well, for displaying the videos in the Video Gallery, I'm using All Video's plugin, but I hacked it so that the output is more standards based. Most media plugins use the combination of the "object" and "embed" tags since "embed" is better supported even though it is a non-standards compliant way to embed media.
The video player itself is JW flash player. I believe All Video comes with this, but I did some configuring of it to make it look nicer. Check out the tutorial section at this site and it should tell you all about the flashvars you can set (or you can use the setup wizard and copy the code)
As far as video encoding, they are encoded for the web with .mp4 and H.264. Initially, most of them were played on TV. I guess that would make it NTSC? Sorry, I don't do the videos. If you want I can ask the guy that did them.....