Okey, you can try this:)

Once you're happy with your final result, you'll need to save the video in a format that YouTube can accept in order to upload. Unless you're a professional video producer, we recommend that you save your videos as either QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common formats and they work well within our system. We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640×480 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.

So there some good converter u will be used: Moyea Video Converter
http://www.my-video-converter.com/video_converter/

First of all, you can probably re-render your video without spending a buck. I've found that WMV and .MOV files work best, with the right settings of course. With windows media, the easiest thing is to probably import into windows movie maker and then render. The export screen will have lots of options, and they will be understandable (such as video for LAN, broadband, etc.). I usually use presets within Premiere pro, so I can't give a detailed explanation for the settings in another editing program. As for quicktime files, your editor should be able to render them once you've downloaded quicktime player (just regular is fine). Mpeg-4 and H.264 are good web codecs, and I usually set the quality to 60 or 70%, and it looks fine, and the files are fairly small as well (30-60mb for a 5 minute video, although settings can be adjusted for your 17 minute video). Hope this helps!

16 shades of color is 4 bits (actual picture has a lot more shades, probably 256)
4 bits for each color is 12 bits
12 bits x 1080 x 1920 = 24 883 200 bits, about 25 Mb

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