Sorenson Squeeze 6 review

Sorenson has been bringing its clever compression technology to bear on the world of video for over a decade. Originally famous for its Apple QuickTime and Macromedia Flash codecs, the company soon branched out to more general encoding software. So now we have the sixth incarnation of Squeeze, which the company claims is the "first end-to-end workflow solution". Marketing jargon aside, this encompasses a host of new facilities aimed at internet publishing and distributed collaboration.

Key to the new workflow enhancements is the Sorenson 360 online service, a year's subscription to which is included with the software. This is like a specialised version of YouTube, designed for sharing video between professionals working together on a project. The account includes 5GB of storage, 100 video streams per month and a maximum length per clip of 30 minutes.

You can set the software to upload your encodings to the Sorenson servers, and automatically have notifications sent to your collaborators that footage is ready for review. The formats supported by 360 include a selection of Flash 6 and 8 presets, plus various MPEG-4 options, and a couple that are compatible with the iPhone 3G. Presets are supplied for all of these, so you can drag one to your encoding job for execution alongside your primary formats.

The notifications can be sent via email or SMS text, or both, and you can protect your uploads with a password. You can set up a list of multiple contacts with email addresses and phone numbers for each, then drag the ones you want to use for a particular encoding format to the respective job. We even found you could pick up the notification on an iPhone, watch the video on the device itself, and then signal your approval. This is a great facility for collaborating with people who are often on the road.

Squeeze 6's online publishing abilities aren't confined to Sorenson's own proprietary service, either. You can now upload directly from Squeeze to public internet servers, too. Options include the user-generated content sites YouTube and (amazingly) Twitter. Alternatively, you can output to commercial content delivery networks, including Akamai and Limelight, but not the popular Brightcove streaming service. The YouTube presets also don't support HD, instead confining you to 320 x 240, although you can create your own HD preset.