I’ve spent the last few years trying to prove (at least to myself) that Sorenson Squeeze Pro could be used professionally. I initially matched it up against two licenses of Anystream Agility (R.I.P. – too expensive, not enough features). Lately I’ve been running it against two licenses of Digital Rapids.
The benefits are obvious. Systems like Agility and Digital Rapids can cost tens of thousands to get up and running, plus the added license fees for various muxers and codecs. Getting five Squeeze licenses running on the latest hardware should run ~$2500 each. That, of course, leaves out quite a few features and advantages of Digital Rapids; but that was my thought process.
Sorenson Squeeze Enterprise Edition
Sorenson seemed to be thinking along the same lines at one time. A few years ago there was a lot of talk about their “Enterprise Edition,” that should have taken over the world by now. Can’t say what happened, but they aren’t talking about it any more. There seems to be some version of it available via BitTorrent, and maybe someone can tell me what that’s about.
The Enterprise Edition would have made a lot of sense for me. Five licenses on five boxes all centrally controlled from my desktop would be fine. Instead, I’m sending source files out the the five boxes and gathering up the results for distrubution. Sort of a “Manual Enterprise Edition.”
Any Help?
I’ve had a lot of problems with Squeeze. Right from the start, the lack of support for Avisynth is almost a killer. I know, I know, “use MAKEAVIs to create a dummy AVI for Squeeze,” but have you ever tried that for 100 files? Another constant problem was that Squeeze was simply not “bulletproof.” Left to run with 20 or 30 files and 10 or 12 encodes, Squeeze 4.5 would usually fail, and not tell why; just no Squeeze in the morning and no word on what happened. This seems to have cleared up with 5.1.
Other problems are small and hard to get at. I soon gave up on their Support, their bug reports and especially their User Forums. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone there who knows more about Squeeze than I do. Most of their Forum watchers seem completely untrained and will usually point any question towards their FAQ.
Does anyone ever use Forums anyway. Ask a question, then come back day after day looking for the answer. I don’t have the patience for it. I think that streamingmedia.com‘s recent attempt to move their very busy email lists to an onsite Forum should be a glaring example to all companies. People want to have their list interaction come to them, they will not go to it.
Squeeze 6
I’ve been testing Squeeze 6 for a week now. They’ve fixed a bug I found with Main Concept H.264. They seem to have tried to fix one of my major complaints with Squeeze: unable to create a hinted H.264 QuickTime file. See my previous post for more about that. I’m sad to report that they didn’t fix it. I can still create an H.264 using Main Concept and export the hinted file via QuickTime. They tried to put that into the software, but all it produces is a pixelated mess.
I’ve tried one of my largest profiles with Squeeze 6. It all worked, so that’s fine. I’ll time it the next time through to test their “Sorenson 6 is much faster” claims. Other bug to test: no concurrent encodes using watch folders.
I’d like to think there was a good reason for this to be Sorenson 6 and not Sorenson 5.2. Haven’t found one yet, but more next week.
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I can’t say that I’ve always liked my name. Mostly I never really liked the contraction to Bill and Billy. If I were raised in Ireland that might have been Liam. Much more to my liking, but a pretentious sounding change for an American at my age. The Caulfield side of it I have always liked. The name has a long and storied history in Northern Ireland, being carried forth today by the other William Caulfield.
The Other William Caulfield
Yes, there is a famous William Caulfield, and it’s not me. Since I do have williamcaulfield.com pointing here, I think he deserves a shoutout.
Comedian William Caulfield
William was born in 1959 in Lurgan, North Ireland. His career in Comedy blossomed on BBC Ulster Radio, doing monologues as various created characters. He moved from there to warmup for a number of BBC and UTV shows. Along the way he appeared on stage in productions of “My Fair Lady,” “Guys and Dolls” and many other musical comedies. Apparently, Mr. Caulfield can do anything comedic, plus he can sing and dance.
His TV show, “An Evening With James Young” was one of the most watched for BBC Northern Ireland in 2008. He has since take it on the road as “Our Jimmy.”
His official website is here:
http://www.williamcaulfield.co.uk/
His Facebook page is here:
William Caulfield – Facebook
We are friends on Facebook, though I’ve never met him. I’ve also never seen him perform. I am planning a trip to Ireland next year, so that will be on the list along with seeing an Ulster Rugby match.
More on the historical William Caulfield Second Viscount Charlemont at another time. Any other William Caulfields out there, let me know, and tell me if you like your name.
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Since my posting on Video Resolution, I’ve had requests for similar information on Video Bitrates. Your wish (up to a reasonable point) is my command. This is for beginners, and many of you may already have all this in your heads. Lucky you!
Bitrate – What is it?
Bitrate = the number of bits per second put into the video/audio information, therefore the number of bits that will need to run through the interwebs while your video is playing.
The bitrate is commonly expressed in Kbps (Kilo-bits per second). Video and audio files are commonly labeled “client_content_300K.mp4″ or just “300.mp4.” The bitrate is one of the four “defining characteristics” of online video: length, format, resolution and bitrate. If you know those four, you usually know as much as you need to use the video online.
bits, Bytes and Filesize
Note the small “b” for bits. It is not “B” for bytes. Bitrate and bandwidth have been expressed in bits and Kbits since the earliest days of the internet, mostly because of the tiny bandwidth available. It was much easier to talk about a 14.4K modem than to discuss a .01406KB modem.
Filesize is defined in Bytes: KB, MB and GB. A byte is eight bits. You can work out the file size from the length and bitrate of a video. Our 300K bitrate above would produce a file that was 37.5KB per second. If our file were 1.1MB, we would know that it was ~30 seconds long. I’ll let you play with the math form there.
A Word from the Eminence Grise
Back when I started in video we only worried about two bitrates, because we were only worried about two device types. There were 28.8K modems and there were 56K modems. We had to leave out some overhead, so we encoded to 22Kbs and 45Kbs. This was the time of “Postage Stamp” video at 96×72 and 128×96 pixels.
With the arrival of T-1 and DSL we could stretch out a bit, but the growth of bandwidth never was fast enough for us, and it still isn’t fast enough today. Clients and encoders are ready to stream 1080p, but the pipes just aren’t big enough.
Which brings us to the golden file of the Golden Age of Web Video: 320×240 at 300kbs.
320×240 @ 300K and Beyond
This was the perfect ratio of Resolution and Bitrate back in the year 2000. From this ratio, we’ve been figuring out bitrates for larger and larger files for the last eight years. So, here we answer the main question that I hear every week: what bitrate should I use for this video.
First we drop out the audio. It doesn’t count for much and it really comes down to 64K is good and 128k is better. In this case we’ll assume 64K. That leaves 236K of encoding power for the video. If you encode at the above specs, and the video looks good, you can use that as a formula for larger resolutions.
“So, what bitrate should I use for my 640×360 video?” Start with 320×240 pixels = 76,800 pixels. That number of pixels looks good when using 236Kbs. Your desired resolution is 640×360* or 230,400 pixels. Time for some math:
76,800/230,400 = 236/x or 236*230,400/76,800 = 708Kbs
*note that this is resolution independent – it doesn’t matter if your video is 4:3 or 16:9
So ~708Kbs for encoding video at 640×360. Add the audio, still at 64K and we get 772Kbs total bitrate for the file. You’ll probably want to round down or up so your files can be nicely labeled as “client_content_640x360_750.mp4″ or something similar.
But Codecs Have Improved
They certainly have, and sometimes formulas from long ago give very big numbers. It would be hard to suggest to a client that they go much over 1500k, but they want to stream 720p (1280×720) video. Our formula puts that at ~3000K! At that point, you’re going to have to bring it down. That means create a file at 720p and 3000K, using the best settings you can achieve for your codec; determine that the file looks great, then start testing down. Most modern codecs will give great results as you go down to 2000K and go under 2000K. Find your sweet spot.
Summing up
- Bitrate is the number of bits used to encode or used to stream a video
- A preliminary bitrate can be determined using a ratio of pixels to bitrate
- Using modern codecs you can take the bitrate down as the resolution goes higher
I hope this is helpful to someone out there. Enjoy!
I am available to consult on any Web Video Encoding issues: wcaulfield@metroencoding.com
Free to Metro Encoding clients
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