MWNY Floor Quickie - Sorenson Media Puts The Squeeze On QuickTime

by , 1:20 PM EDT, July 20th, 2001

QuickTime is a great technology for digital movies. Unfortunately, some movies can get quite large, making distribution to those with slow network connections difficult. There are high-end tools, such as Cleaner, which can compress QuickTime video. But now Sorenson has decided to enter this arena with the announcement of Squeeze, the first VBR compression application for Mac OS X.

We were able to view an alpha version of the Squeeze application. It has a simplified interface, where all one needs to do is click on the button representing the download rate of the recipient. For each button that you select, a compressed movie will be created. In the future, all compressed movies may be stored in a single file.

We used a 50MB file for test. When targeting a 384kb line, the resulting compressed movie was 500K, showing a 100 to 1 savings. Although the resulting movie displayed some artifacts, the quality was very good, considering the size reduction. We also created a movie targeted for a 56kb line, and the resulting size was around 50K, which is a 1000 to 1 savings. Unfortunately, due to the alpha nature of the software, we were unable to play this file.

Sorenson Squeeze will be released Q4 2001. Pricing has not yet been set, but should be less that Cleaner and other tools.

Sorenson Media