Just a quick note about Sorenson Squeeze 6. I was testing for an upcoming review in my Affordable HD column for Millimeter Magazine and encountered a very serious bug relating to producing in VP6 format. Specifically, in my tests, Squeeze 6 couldn't

Sorenson Squeeze 6 and VP6 Encoding

Just a quick note about Sorenson Squeeze 6. I was testing for an upcoming review in my Affordable HD column for Millimeter Magazine and encountered a very serious bug relating to producing in VP6 format. Specifically, in my tests, Squeeze 6 couldn’t come anywhere close to my target data rates. For example, when I encoded a file at 500 kbps, the lowest data rate that I could achieve was about 3 mbps. This basically makes the program unusable for most VP6 production.

I pinged Sorenson, who reported that the bug had creeped into a late stage release candidate and just hadn’t been caught, but should be resolved with a maintenance release in the next couple of weeks. Otherwise, in my preliminary testing, I saw no other major issues. The review will appear on the Millimeter web site early next week.

In the short term,  if you’re buying Squeeze 6 for most VP6 encoding operations, you should wait until the bug is fixed. I’m sure I’ll get a patch as soon as it’s available and I’ll test and confirm when the problem is resolved.

About Jan Ozer

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I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

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