Sorenson Media has released Sorenson Squeeze 8, which adds enhanced functionality and ease-of-use to the company’s video encoding and transcoding application at a lower price point. In addition, the company has also introduced Sorenson Squeeze 8 Lite, which makes select features of Squeeze 8 accessible to prosumers at a further reduced price.

Key additions to Sorenson Squeeze 8 include: Squeeze Server integration; adaptive bitrate encoding for new formats, unprecedented x264 support and optimization; and enhanced GPU acceleration. The new version’s seamless integration with Squeeze Server maximizes encoding and transcoding power for the enterprise and other high-volume users by enabling users to free up their desktop machines by offloading encoding jobs to a separate server.

Sorenson Squeeze 8 includes optimized performance for all three leading adaptive bitrate streaming platforms: Adobe Dynamic Streaming; Apple HTTP Adaptive Streaming; and Microsoft Smooth Streaming. The adaptive bitrate support automatically transcodes each individual video file into multiple, chunked segments in a full array of bitrates, organizes these segments into a folder, and delivers them to the specified destinations for playback on any device.

Sorenson Squeeze 8 boasts full support for the increasingly popular x264 codec. It provides in-product instructions that enable video professionals to adjust and optimize up to 48 major encoding parameters, including key frame rates, encoding modes and performance, to adapt the H.264 format to their needs and workflow.

Optimized for Squeeze 8, GPU acceleration using Nvidia CUDA has become the best option for creating .mp4 proxy files in both speed and quality, according to the folks at Sorenson. CUDA encoding enables both faster encoding and video quality equal to video content encoded without GPU acceleration, including true to source black levels, says Randon Morford, Squeeze product manager for Sorenson Media.

Available for the first time, Sorenson Squeeze 8 Lite enables the expanding market of web developers, videographers and other content creators who are focused primarily on online publishing to cost-effectively encode and transcode in the most popular video formats, including Flash FLV, Flash SWF, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, WMA, WebM and others, he adds This streamlined version of the software enables single file encoding with the ability to still use popular settings and filters available in Sorenson Squeeze.

Sorenson Squeeze 8 is available immediately. The suggested retail price for Sorenson Squeeze 8 is US$599 ($200 less than the suggested retail price for the earlier full version) and Squeeze 8 Lite is $199. The Squeeze 8 "classic" edition also includes a complimentary account for the Sorenson 360 online video platform, complete with Review & Approval functionality. For more info go to http://www.sorensonmedia.com .