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Issues With Squeeze, ProCoder (long post)
I’m at the point where I will soon need high-quality options for web and mobile content, so I downloaded and installed the trials for Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 and Canopus ProCoder 1.5. I installed, tested and uninstalled Squeeze before doing the same with ProCoder. The 2 apps were never on my system at the same time.
Squeeze had a couple of random crashes during testing that I could not reproduce reliably, but the last one occurred when I canceled an encoding operation before it finished.
Squeeze was also dog-slow. I don’t have much of a reference with this genre of application, but if anyone is familiar with Adobe’s Media Encoder (CS3), Squeeze was encoding to Sorenson Video 3 Pro at about the same rate that the AME encodes to mpeg4. That worked out to be about 5x-8x real time.
ProCoder was significantly faster to QT, but I don’t think ProCoder used the Pro version of SV3.
ProCoder crashed a couple of times on exit, but again, I couldn’t reliably determine what operations in the app triggered the exit crash.
After uninstalling Squeeze and while ProCoder was still installed, my CD/DVD burning app of choice, GearPro, stopped recognizing my DVD burners. So did iTunes. I don’t know which operation or combo of operations with installing Squeeze, uninstalling Squeeze and installing ProCoder caused the mishap, but an image restore to the day before I installed Squeeze made everything OK again.
So my question is this: should I expect this kind of flaky behavior from compression apps, or are there tips/tricks to get them to play nice with my system?
Specs:
WinXP SP2 32-bit
P4 3.0 GHz w/HT
2.0 GB RAM
Separate SATA OS, data and media drives, with nearly 1 TB of storage available
M-Audio sound card
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card
Pioneer 106D and NEC 3520A DVD burnersThanks,
-Jeff -
2 Replies
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No, of course you shouldn’t get flaky behaviour from compression apps or any apps for that matter, but, in my extensive experience, this behaviour is very much part of the ‘wonderful’ experience of running Windows.
Uninstalling an application in (either using the application uninstaller or Add/Remove programs) rarely uninstalls everything that was installed alongside it and it maybe this that starts to cause problems. I have numerous XP systems whos applications crash on exit or suffer from multiple general errors on shutting down, or I have to end various processes with the task manager. I’ve just got used to it.
Although no excuse, let’s not forget that Windows XP is getting on to be well over 7 years old.
The demo version of Procoder is very much out of date and I would base any purchase judgement as the lastest version is so much better.
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[JackHammer] “Uninstalling an application in (either using the application uninstaller or Add/Remove programs) rarely uninstalls everything that was installed alongside it and it maybe this that starts to cause problems. I have numerous XP systems whos applications crash on exit or suffer from multiple general errors on shutting down, or I have to end various processes with the task manager. I’ve just got used to it.”
Thank you for your response.
Other than these 2 demos, I *do not* have the problems you describe with Windows XP.
My system has 2 versions of Adobe’s Production Studio (CS2 and CS3) installed plus various plug-ins for the apps; MS Office; Mozilla apps; QT Pro and iTunes; and various utilities (no Norton). The system is very stable in its current state, and I find the results of the introduction of the 2 demos disturbing.
Often, other users will have problems with Adobe’s suite because of installed codecs and codec packs, with results similar to mine when I installed the demos. I am skeptical that maybe the compression suites are glorified codec packs, standing by to conflict with installed software and the OS.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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