Sorenson Squeeze 8 is too expensive for converting your company picnic videos to your boss's favorite format. However, if you're a pro or enthusiast looking for the best possible transcoding and a wide variety of input and output options it's definitely worth a look-see. The program comes in two flavors: a $599 version that integrates with both Sorenson's and other company’s high-end products, and supports adaptive bit rate and AC3; and a $199 Lite version that lacks these features. You can find a comparison chart of the two versions at vendor Sorenson Media's website.

Squeeze 8 supports nVidia CUDA GPU acceleration, but not AMD APP or Intel's Quick sync. The program imported nearly every format I threw at it, with the exception of rapidly disappearing file type RealMedia. Ogg Theora is supported--a nice touch. The transcoding results are nothing short of excellent and the filters--such as black and white, sepia, auto crop deinterlace, etc.--produced very good results.

Most home users will do just fine with a free program such as Freemake Video Converter, which leverages open source and free codecs to do much the same thing. Even Squeeze uses the open source FFDShow for importing many file types. However, adaptive bit rate, or ABR (which is used in Apple HLS, Adobe Flash Dynamic, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming) is an important and rapidly expanding technology found only in programs such as Squeeze 8.

ABR breaks video into chunks and encodes each in multiple bit rates. When streamed, if the video server senses that bandwidth has decreased or increased, it can send the next segment of video at a lower or higher bit rate to maintain smooth video playback.

If you're a pro who does lots of encoding, then Squeeze 8 is definitely worth the download. The ABR allows state-of-the-art performance from your video server, and output from either version is as good as it gets. Plus, I've only scratched the surface of the filters and other advanced features.

--Jon L. Jacobi