With Squeeze 8, Sorenson looks to simplify video encoding

Sorenson Media has a big following in the desktop video encoding market with its Squeeze software. It's looking to solidify that share with the launch today of an updated version, Squeeze 8, and is also reaching to expand its user base with a "lite" version aimed down market.

Squeeze 8 increases the amount of automation in the video encoding process, simplifying the process.

"Video encoding is a time consuming, CPU intensive process," Coby Rich, the company's director of marketing said. "Our goal with Squeeze 8 was to simplify the process and make it easier."

Squeeze 8 gives high-volume users the ability to offload workflow to a separate server, in the cloud, behind a user's firewall or in any Windows-based server environment. It's also focused on making it faster with GPU acceleration using NVIDIA CUDA, which Sorenson sees as the best option for creating .mp4 proxy files in terms of both speed and quality.

Sorenson features optimized support for all three leading adaptive bitrate streaming platforms--Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Apple HTTP Adaptive Streaming and Microsoft Smooth Streaming--and added support for the x.264 codec.

The Squeeze user base includes mom-and-pop video shops, as well as companies like NBC and Gannett. Its new Squeeze 8 Lite version--with a$199 price tag--brings the software downstream to a broader audience that might not be willing to spend $599 per user, like content producers and videographers looking to publish online in formats including Flash FLV, Flash SWF, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, WMA and WebM.

For more:
- see this release

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