HandBrake is the best option for everything you want to do for these reasons:

1. You want to choose your bitrate, and use a variable bitrate
2. You want to crop it (and I assume you want to be able to preview exactly what you're cropping)
3. You want to preserve chapters
4. You're using a Mac, and an older one at that

Get the most recent version of HandBrake you can that will work on your system and use that. Nothing else is going to be much faster, and anything that is will be missing out on some key features for you (namely chapter preservation and Mac compatibility).

If it's any consolation, I use HandBrake on a 3-year-old 2.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with OS X 10.5.8 and 4GB RAM, and it takes a damn sight longer than I'd like (about 75-80% the length of the movie, sometimes almost the exact same length).