Sorenson Media has launched Sorenson Squeeze 7, a major upgrade to its video encoding application that aims to take some of the pain--in the form of time savings--out of the encoding process for video professionals.
"The hyper growth of professional video has continued unabated, and that's a trend that's not going away anytime soon," Eric Quanstrom, Sorenson's COO, told FierceOnlineVideo. That growth has been accompanied by a similar boom in new devices on which to watch online video as well as ongoing jostling between competing video codecs.
"At the end of the day, our customers don't really care what format it's in, they just want it to play well on any device it lands on," he said. "And that required each video to be encoded for each device, for each browser. That can, for the video professional, be a lot of drudgery, a lot of wasted time. The biggest benefit you're going to get from Squeeze 7 is time saving."
Squeeze 7 leverages NVIDIA CUDA architecture and adds GPU acceleration, Sorenson says. It recognizes whether a user's primary CPU or GPU may be faster and will use the better resource for the encoding job. Sorenson says internal testing shows the upgraded software can speed up the encoding process in the H.264 format by as much as 300 percent over Squeeze 6.
The upgrade, says Sorenson, also transforms adaptive bitrate encoding into an easy, intuitive experience, encoding multiple renditions of videos at varying data rates and segmenting files and uploading them to the user's chosen content delivery network.
"All of this fragmentation, like being unable to watch Hulu on an iPad, isn't going away," added David Dudas, VP of product management. "All of those new tablets that were introduced at CES, for example, create an environment where that's gong to be more prevalent. The losers in the format wars are the consumers and content creators. It's incumbent for publishers to encode in all of them. Nobody wants a consumer to not be able to watch their content because it on the 'wrong' device."
Quanstrom said Squeeze 7 already has seen brisk pre-release sales (upgrades start at $299, with limited $199 pricing for Squeeze 6 users; the full product is $799) from "dyed-in-the-wool media guys," the education market, and government agencies.
He also pointed out that the upgrades in Squeeze 7 are also available in Sorenson Server, the web-based video encoding service that the company offers in two flavors, a cloud-based managed service and an on-premise version. Quanstrom said a third option, a hybrid that combines on-premise and cloud-based element, also is available.
"It's exciting for us to be able to offer solutions where we can throw a lot of elements at the specific problem," he said.
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