<p>Could anyone could point me to some code/give me ideas on how to create a smooth scrolling vertical marquee for VFP 8 or 9?</p>

<p>Any help is appreciated.</p>

Whether you decide to host the video yourself depends greatly on your requirements, hosting environment and technology you use. If it's a small personal site, than it's prefectly ok to host it on youtube or another hosting service, but if you are making a corporate site, it looks much more professional if you host it yourself. Or if the video won't change very frequently it's pretty easy to just host it yourself.
To host it yourself it's just simply puting in a web accessible directory on the server and setting the URL in the player.
If you need to do content management, than keep in mind the possible upload limits you will have on the server, and the fact, that HTTP is not the ideal protocol for uploading large files.
If you have to recode the video on the server, than don't forget that it will be a serious performance hit to it while the encoding is running.
To recode the video on the server I prefer to use FFMPEG or mencoder (both have windows and linux/unix versions).