This is not a new one, but I realized I'd not mentioned it before.

When you encode video for a living, you invariably spend a chunk of time trying to reverse engineer the work of others.  How the heck did they make that trailer?  What makes that You Tube clip look so good.  The info you get from most player's info panel is limited at best.  That's where you need a tool like MediaInfo Mac.  This has long existed for our PC bretheren, but hasn't been around nearly as long for the mac.

It is an open source analyzer that will give you a quick behind the scenes look at some of the settings that may have gone into making a piece of video.  It is an excellent way to do that reverse work plus its dead handy for looking at your own work to figure out if something is as it should be (I recently used it to solve the mystery of hy some new settings weren't allowing me to sync movies to m iPhone - turned out I'd left Main profile enabled).

The best part of MediaInfo?  The price tag - for all its usefulness, this little puppy is free!  That means you have ZERO excuses to not try this out, so run, don't walk!