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One of the tricks to speedy encoding with Sorenson Squeeze is to open multiple instances of the program and encode in parallel, which you could do on the Mac and in Windows through version 5.x. When I tested this with version 6, however, it no longer worked on the Mac.
For this reason, when I reviewed Sorenson Squeeze for my 2010 Encoder Review story, I concluded:
Note that while I could run multiple instances of Squeeze 5 and produce H.264 files simultaneously, when I opened multiple instances of Squeeze 6 on the Mac, the H.264-related templates and presets were not available, slowing H.264 performance compared to Squeeze 5 considerably. That’s why there’s an “N/A” in this line for Squeeze 6.
After the article came out, I heard the following from a contact at Sorenson:
Hey, I just read your “Where The Rubber Meets The Road: 2010 Encoder Comparison” article and wanted you to know that I just figured out the problem as to why you couldn’t run multiple instances of Squeeze on the Mac with MP4 presets in both. I have heard this once before and started looking into it. The problem is that the name of the Squeeze executable is linked to some of our codecs so the Squeeze executable would have to be named “Squeeze” and not “Squeeze copy” or something like that in order for the MP4 codec to load. So if you were to paste a copy of the Squeeze executable to another directory on your machine, you would be allowed to have bother named “Squeeze” and then you would be able to do what you were trying to do. Just thought you would want to know.
With previous versions of Squeeze, I simply created multiple copies of Squeeze called Squeeze 1, Squeeze 2, etc, and as my contact indicated, that wouldn’t (and didn’t) work. So, I tried putting copies called Squeeze in multiple directories and it worked like a charm. Here’s what it looks like in my Applications folder.
I recommend trying this approach for H.264 and VP6 encoding on the Mac and Windows. Note that in Windows you don’t have to mes with creating the directory structure, you can just run the program once for each version you want opened. For example, if you have a quick launch icon on your desktop for Squeeze (and who doesn’t?), just click it five times if you want five open instances.
