Yes, yes, yes. If you stay within the limits I wrote, h.264 plays reasonably well. Try simple (baseline) profile or main profile.

And 1200Kbps is way too much. Encoding video is a compromise between quality (which in the end depends on what you can see on a given screen size) and size (even if flash memory price have fallen, size remains a constraint).

The question was: "how do I do that on a mac?". I encode videos on the mac regularly. What I wrote is what I use. What I wrote works. What I wrote encodes a typical movie (1h40+) to about 400 MB. What I wrote plays on the built-in media player. So why "no, no, no"?