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Filed under: compression •Distribution •

Sorenson 360 video server service

Sharing the file is as easy as copying the permalink code for the video and pasting it into an email. It is possible to password encode the video if you are concerned about unauthorized viewers. If you want to have the video play on your website or someone else’s website, then copy the embed code and paste it into the html code of your website. This is a similar procedure to embedding a YouTube video. If you look very closely, you can see that one of the cool features of Squeeze 5 is the ability to watermark your videos with your company logo. Mine is placed very small in the bottom right corner, but placement, size and transparency are all customizable parameters. It’s nice that this watermarking is part of the encode process because you can create a “clean” video file and only watermark the versions of encoded files that you believe may be at risk.

The ability to enable passwords for specific videos is a great thing. To do this, select a video that is already up on your 360 account. On the right side, above the metrics graph, is a series of three logos on tabs, including a lock tab. Click on that to reveal the password protection choices. The default is “Disabled.” To enable password protection, click the radio button for “Enabled,” type in your preferred password and hit “Save.” This is one of the few apps that I’ve seen where it only requires a single entry of the password, so make sure you don’t “fat-finger” the keys when you type your password, or nobody will be able to view it. It might be a good idea to copy and paste the password from someplace else instead of typing it in. Now, even someone watching the video on an iPhone will need to enter the password to view the video.

One of my issues with 360 is that you have to go to the website and click through to your video in order to have access to the Permalink and embed codes. It would be much more convenient for these to be delivered to you in a more automatic fashion once the encoding and publishing was complete. Hopefully this is something they’ll address in a future release.

Sorenson’s monthly serving plans are definitely easy to understand and seem to be reasonably priced, but there are definitely a lot of people out there who do NOT need 10,000 streams of video in a month and it would be great to see some kind of plan for those of us who are simply using it for review and approval or other low volume applications.

Setting aside 360 for a moment, I also have to complain that the documentation for Squeeze is abysmal. Luckily for most Squeeze users – and for Sorenson’s customer support reps – the software is very intuitive. But finding the last 10% of functionality will be a futile exercise except through the how-to posts of your favorite bloggers or maybe user community Q&A. Another mitigating factor in my distaste for Squeeze’s documentation is that if you order the latest version of Squeeze, it comes with very good instructional DVD course in compression in general and using Squeeze in particular, so kudos to Sorenson for that.

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