Squeeze 5.0 Pro beefs up its interface, making it easier to find and work with its many presets.

Sorenson Media’s Squeeze compresses video into file sizes aimed for the Internet, digital media devices, or DVD, and in formats such as QuickTime, Flash Video, and Windows Media. Essentially, there’s no flavor of video it can’t create.

Now hitting the big 5.0, this new Squeeze sports some handy new workflow refinements. You’ve always been able to save video and audio settings into a preset, but now you can build specific file destinations into those presets (like an FTP server, for example), along with filter settings. You can also group multiple presets into a super-preset folder. To make presets easier to find, you can sort them by format (Flash, QuickTime, MPEG, and so on) or target device (DVD, iPhone, etc.), and quickly find presets via a text search.

Squeeze 5 also improves and expands its filter library. Highlights include a new Watermark filter (finally!), along with a much-needed Hue and Saturation filter for countering the color shifts that can occur in compressed video. New audio filters let you adjust volume, change the length of audio (keeping pitch intact), and fix clicks, pops, and other noise. 

Squeeze also gains some new compression codecs for Blu-ray DVDs and AC3 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. Sorenson also says it improved the visual quality of its MPEG-2 and H.264 codecs, but we couldn’t see a difference in our comparisons with video created in Squeeze 4.5. Your results may vary.

Unfortunately, Squeeze can be a slowpoke when compressing video clips. Compressing a single 2-minute video to the popular H.264 codec using a quad-core Mac Pro, took about 10 minutes, versus 2 minutes, 23 seconds using Apple’s Compressor, which comes free with Final Cut Studio, and image quality was about equal in both versions. Squeeze wasn’t much faster when we tried compressing video to the Flash format, either. On the flip side, Squeeze 5 can speed up batch encoding by taking advantage of all the cores in your Mac’s CPU. On our quad-core Mac, for example, Squeeze encoded three H.264 videos in about the same time that it needed to do a single one.