Sorenson Squeeze 5 Settings for Vimeo – help!

[Ian Smith]

No, I haven’t installed any Mega-Codec Packs.

I have another PC here but it’s a Pentium 4 XP machine and I really don’t want to put Vista anywhere near it given my experience with Vista upgrades in the past. It’s also only got wireless connectivity so transferring things like 2GB HD videos from my main PC to that just for compression is a complete pain.

But I’ll try installing Sorenson on the this and use a short clip for H.264 tests. At least that way if it fails with the same issue then the finger points firmly at Sorenson (as Vista and Vegas Pro will have been cut out ouf the equation).

If the XP PC works I’ll then uninstall Sorenson, install Vegas, reinstall Sorenson and see if that re-introduces a problem.

Sigh! Looks like another weekend faffing around just trying to root out issues – and that’s before I even get anywhere near Vimeo 🙁

[Ian Smith]

Well the H.264 issues seems to have been fixed by reinstalling Vegas Pro and Sorenson Squeeze on an XP system. Longer term this isn’t a solution for me as the XP system is slower and doesn’t have the PCI Express slots on it for grabbing my footage so now I have an extra step in my workflow which involves having to copy all footage to a DVD before it can be compressed.

Hard to know what it is on the Vista PC that is causing the problem – either Vista itself or some other installed software (eg it has Camtasia Studio 5 and AnyHDDVD installed) but it just confirms my belief that Vista is an operating system best avoided.

One last set of tests to do – compression of wmv for uploading to Vimeo. If it works then I guess that shows my Vista PC is completely hosed for ANY Sorenson work since H.264 gives me sound only and wmv gives me files that Vimeo can’t publish.

Ian

[Daniel Low]

Thanks for letting us know the outcome of this.

For others that are reading this, take this as a warning to stay away from Vista.

I’ve personally witnessed far too many people suffer with it. Like I said in my earlier post, it’s a total and utter train wreck and should never have been released in its current form.

Shame on Microsoft.

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Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying ‘thanks’ is free!

[Ian Smith]

Actually it’s now looking like Vista was a red herring.

When I installed Squeeze on an XP machine over the weekend I downloaded Squeeze from the web, and it turns out they put a new version up on 17th June!

Today Sorenson Support asked me to uninstall Squeeze from Vista (for the second time) and install the 17th June version (v5.0.2) but this time they also asked me to uninstall ffdshow which gets installed as part of Squeeze but shows up as a separate program in the Add/Remove programs section.

So at this point I’m not sure if it was leaving ffdshow installed after the first Squeeze uninstall, or simply the newer version of Squeeze that fixed the problem, but I suspect it’s the latter.

It’s early days yet but my first quick test using a short clip and one of their MPEG4 quickstart filters has successfully rendered out video where before it was rendering only audio.

I’m going to leave the original 1280×720 1 hour video running overnight to see if the problem really has gone away.

If that works then it’s on to the next batch of problems that I’ve already faced trying to upload wmv video rathre than H.264 video: Vimeo constantly fails any .wmv files despite the fact they play fine locally, so I am not confident the H.264 versions will be any different. In desperation I tried ExposureRoom to see if that has Vimeo-like problems. Alas, just like Viddler it fails on just trying to upload a file long before it’s got even 10% of the way through uploading, so no joy there either.

One problem at a time, I guess. And if it were easy everybody would be doing it?!