Sorenson Squeeze

» see sorenson.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Squeeze was a compression tool, which sounds duller than the job it actually did. In 2001 there was no agreed format for video on a web page. QuickTime and RealVideo were both making a claim on it, Windows Media arrived to make a third, and Flash showed up shortly after, with each one wanting different settings and a different container. Squeeze let you load a source file once, tick the outputs you needed, and walk away while it wrote all of them. Batch encoding to multiple targets was the entire value proposition, and it was worth real money to anyone shipping video professionally.

Sorenson Media released it on 29 October 2001. A build specifically for Macromedia Flash MX followed on 14 March 2002, and Squeeze 3 added MPEG-4 in January 2003. The version history reads like a map of the codec wars, running from version 5 in March 2008 to version 11 as late as August 2016.

The company was the same Sorenson whose codec Apple had put inside QuickTime 3 in 1998, so the pedigree was real. Squeeze was the tool half the web's early video passed through on its way out.

~ the record ~

~ the flash decade ~

Between roughly 2003 and 2011 the answer to "how do I put video on a website" was an FLV file and a Flash player wrapped around it, and getting a clean FLV out of a DV or HDV master was fiddly enough that people paid for a tool that got it right. Squeeze sat in that gap. Its presets were how a lot of small production shops learned what a bitrate was.

Then the gap closed from both ends. YouTube and Vimeo took the upload and did the transcoding themselves, so the delivery format stopped being the customer's problem. Adobe shipped Media Encoder alongside Premiere at no extra cost, and Apple put Compressor next to Final Cut. A paid standalone encoder needs the platform to be messy, and by 2015 it was not messy anymore.

~ the quiet discontinuation ~

There was no farewell page for this one. An end-of-life notice went out, the product stopped being sold, and it disappeared from the Avid Media Composer bundle it had been shipping inside. Sorenson discontinued it in January 2019. The trade coverage that exists is a handful of posts by editors noting that another familiar icon had been taken off the shelf, the same week Telestream's Episode line was going the same way.

~ on the other side of the file ~

I was on the receiving end of this software for years without knowing its name. Every stuttering 320x240 clip I waited out on a TTNet line in the mid 2000s had come through some encoder like this one, and the reason so much of that era's video looks specifically bad in one recognizable way is that somebody chose a preset for a 56k audience and never revisited it. Tools that shape a whole period's output tend to be invisible from the viewer's chair, which is the position I was in.

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