Perennial video encoding champions Sorenson Media released their latest version of the popular Squeeze platform, Squeeze 9.

You can even take it for a free test drive.

I’ve yet to give it a full workout, and won’t personally benefit from the HTML5 optimization, but Sorenson promises speed and quality improvements and a new user interface. Some of us stodgy old guys were perfectly fine with the old interface, which was more than adequate for my purposes, but we’ll see just how intuitive the new workflow is for this old dog. Also curious to see just how much time it can knock out of my encodes. Their new parallel processing breaks decoded video files into “chunks” and partitions them across multiple CPUs, and claims to be twice as fast as Squeeze 8. I just need a few hours to sit and do nothing but watch the clock before I can make my own conclusions.

Personally, I’ve been encoding my movie collection to MP4 for streaming (using Plex Media Server) to my phones and tablets using open source solutions, and am eager to see if Squeeze 9 takes some of the hassle out of my cobbled together workflow, and, more importantly, how it handles multi-channel audio. But I’m tired of doing three encodes to get a small (MP4/stereo), medium (MP4/Dolby PLII) and large (h264 DTS/AC-3 in MKV containers) version of the same content and am pretty confident that Squeeze 9 is going to replace Handbrake in my personal life.

I’ve always enjoyed using Squeeze and am pretty confident their latest offering will be more than satisfactory for my encoding needs.