What are the best third party compression utilities

What are the best (and hopefully free) third party compression utilities that are compatible with FCP7 that I can use to export and compress Quicktime reference movies, instead of using Compressor. My files are always very large and I am looking for an application I can use to customize the size of the final file according to my needs. I would like to do this while skipping the need to go through compressor first as this usually take so many hours to finish.

Thank you.