Please try Air Video HD. It works out of the box with no complicated setting choices.
Within one stricly controlled eco-system, sure.
We're trying to support more then iOS with one set of defaults here.
Gizmo streaming also works out of the box without many settings, yet the advanced users complain and want advanced options.
From what i read, it uses H.264 passthrough (ie. remuxing) if possible, so any H.264 files would just decode as-is, assuming your bandwidth can do that, and of course look quite good.
Lots of video is H.264 these days, especially HD, so that is an option that can save you from a conversion, and something worth investigating for MC as well.
But that brings me back to the original problem, either Streaming needs more different quality profiles, or at least some options to be able to configure the profiles.
Pass-through wouldn't work on my Android Tablet at all, because this old Galaxy Tab 10.1 just doesn't decode most H.264 streams.