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Company: Sorenson
Price: $119
Official Website
System details: Windows XP, 1200 Mhz Celeron, 512 MB, IE 6, DVD, CD-RW
 This review is strictly to cover Squeeze's performance. Forget about all the rumors. How does Squeeze hold up as a product? That's what Scottmanning.com intends to find out.
What exactly is Squeeze for MX?
Well, if you're new to the Flash scene, then I should tell you that the latest Flash Player offers video support. This is a bold new step for Macromedia that some are predicting will put an end to the need for media players for viewing video over the Internet.
That prediction is almost true, because Flash MX needs to gain some video streaming functions if it hopes to compete against the likes of Real and Windows Media Player. Flash MX is missing bitrate control and any advanced compression technology. Squeeze for MX's main purpose is to take video and encode it into Flash to stream at a pre-determined bitrate. What that means in English is that a video can now be viewed with Flash Player 6 at a pre-determined Internet speed.
Squeeze only encodes MOV and DV files
The first thing that surprised us in our review of Squeeze is that it will only encode MOV (QuickTime) and DV (Digital Video) video. This was puzzling because Flash MX can encode any standard video file supported by QuickTime or Windows Media Player, including MPEG, DV, MOV, and AVI. Flash MX supports these file types 'natively' with the Sorenson Spark codec. So why doesn't Sorenson Squeeze encode the same file types that the Sorenson Spark codec enables Flash Player 6 to support?
Our test video
The video used in our tests is a movie trailer for the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Encoding the video in Flash MX
While Squeeze can encode video into QuickTime and .FLV format, this review focuses on how well it encodes video into Flash. The results were impressive. As you can see from the table below, Squeeze compressed the 8.6 MB video to only 4.27 MB. The image and sound quality of the encoded videos were superb.
| 240 x 130 | 200 | 32 | No | 12 | 11 min for
all
three
together | 1.73 | | | 320 x 174 | 304 | 48 | Yes | 12 | 2.60 | | | 320 x 174 | 504 | 64 | Yes | 24 | 4.27 | | *All of these samples will require Flash Player 6. |
During the encoding process, the user has the option to view the video frame-by-frame as its being encoded. I found this feature to be cool, yet worthless. While I might enjoy measuring the status of my encoding process by which frame Squeeze is currently encoding, the excitement wore off after the second video.
There is also a status bar to measure the progress of the encoding.
Incorrect dimensions
When using Squeeze's pre-sets, the program does not give the exact dimensions of an outputted file. Instead it estimates the width and height. For example, our first test video was set to have a frame size of 240 x 180 using Squeeze's pre-sets for low broadband connection, but the actually frame size was 240 x 130.
Advanced video editing capabilities
Squeeze offers plenty of video editing features including cropping, fade in and out, contrast, brightness, gamma, white restore, black restore, deinterlacing, and video noise reduction. The best part about using these settings is that you can preview the results of changing the settings on a frame from the movie (see below).
In our test video, none of these settings were needed because we were dealing video that had already been edited. These features offer users some powerful control over video that hasn't been fully edited or video that needs a final touch.
Flash MX for Squeeze
Just as Flash needs Squeeze to enhance its video streaming capabilities by offering bitrate control and more compression settings, Squeeze needs Flash to have control over video playback. Video encoded into Squeeze starts playing automatically when opened and loops forever. Even with all the extra editing features, there is no way to control this using Squeeze; you need Flash MX.
This makes Squeeze less of a stand-alone product and more of an add-on, hence the name 'Squeeze for MX'.
Overall
Overall, Squeeze is an excellent product if you need to encode DV or QuickTime video into Flash (only playable with Flash Player 6) without any playback control. If you need playback controls, you'll have to buy Flash MX. |
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