well that sounds very widescreen, so some cropping would help a ton unless you have a widescreen tv.

DVD quality is 720 by 480, but most TVs only have 525 vertical lines of resolution, 480 of which are visible. VHS tape has 240 horizontal lines, tv broadcasts have 330, but the resolution for the tv varies. So encode the vertical resolution at 525 or above, and the horizontal at the matching resolution in display mode. I'd say that'd do the trick for a regular TV.

And if there's artifacts on the video when you watch on computer, it's funny how much better it will look on a tv. so I wouldn't worry about that with 1.2G files.