August 27, 2004

Sorenson Squeeze 4 gotcha for flv junkies

Well the newest version of Sorenson Squeeze has made it out which is awesome. I've been waiting for this for quite some time as I do a lot of vid work and need to get it to flv. Very nice looking app I think, and there are some seriously major improvements. Unfortunately there is a small problem....

For the progressive FLV player component that we created, it requires the metadata that *doesn't* get put in with squeeze 3.5. Which means we have been using flvmdi quite liberally and then reading the file into flash. This has worked great so far but I really didn't want to have to keep opening up the little black command window to use this tool and was truly hoping that Squeeze 4 would have metadata put in properly on encoding. It does get put in... but it's wrong. In point, it doesn't put in the proper size of the flv (in height and width) which is very bad for players that use that info (like any player that is worth it's sand..). So until they fix this bug (whether they are aware of it or not is beyond me..) it's a necessity for all you flv junkies to continue to use flvmdi. Which I guess isn't so bad, 'cause you do get more info with it and can put in your own stuff if you really want to. It's just that it would be so nicely convenient to get it all done in one jump.. especially for batch jobs. *sigh*

Posted by Graeme at August 27, 2004 04:42 PM
　



Comments

Do you know if there are any other metadata issues going on? I have seen some weird behaviors using Squeeze 4 flvs comparing them to QuickTime flvs, i.e. some functionality I have in a player wont work when I use a Sorenson flv.

Posted by: Sam Robbins at August 27, 2004 10:53 PM

hmm.. I have yet to have a problem with the files but I don't trust it to put in the much needed metadata. When you say it won't play, does it not even read it in? I'd say that maybe the player is relying on a certain metadata or something to start up maybe? Not sure what is going on there. What player is it? Is it a publicly sold player?

Posted by: Graeme at August 27, 2004 11:51 PM

The player reads the file, however the metadata encoding in SQ4 is setting the height value to match the width, resulting in a square movie. Extremely bad for the specific project we were working on, as the clips were in wide screen cinema format.

Posted by: Kris Honeycutt at September 1, 2004 12:27 AM

Below is the email I received in response to the bug report I submitted regarding the above.

--------------------------------------
Kris,
I have had a few other complaints regarding this issue. I apologize
but it looks like we do not have an immediate fix for this. We have
forwarded the problem to our product development team and they are working
on a fix which would most likely be released in a point release.

Thank You, Andy Engberson
--------------------------------------

Posted by: Kris Honeycutt at September 1, 2004 11:12 AM