Yep... Kiss your $30 goodbye.
On the upside QuickTime Player Pro does handle simple editing of MOV files very well, and some of their codecs aren't terrible.
Okay, I can't really think of any...
If you want to encode H.264 - use x264, hands down. The word "Best" is frowned upon in this forum, but I can pretty confidently say that x264 is the BEST H.264 codec out at the moment
Oh yeah, it's free too..
~MiSfit