As an alternative to purchasing a second seat of Sorenson Squeeze, Riva Encoder, a free transcoder may be the answer, especially if you want a solution for your laptop.

Riva will transcode from the following video formats: AVI, MPEG, QuickTime and WMV. In addition, you can use JPEG still images. Riva does not use the On2 Codecs such as the VP6 which produces high quality images. Riva uses FFmpeg, a compression set comprises under the Linux operating system, here is a link if you really want to dive into the Codec documentation

I have been testing and found the application works under most circumstances; it has refused to transcode some .AVI files with the following error message:

Since the files I tested were all rendered as uncompressed .AVI, the reason for the failure is unclear and their site did not provide any insight. In addition, when you press the Encode button there is no progress bar to indicate the program is working, the first time I tried it I thought it had frozen. In addition, their application support is limited with no rollover dialogs or on-line help. In addition, their on-line FAQ is empty. There are two demos however, they are (MOS) and there is no high-level overview which I would think would be the first one they created.

Their forum: does have some useful information however, there are also plenty of month old posts from users, which have not been addressed by the company.

When I contacted the company for more information, they commented as follows:

"We are not in the IPTV Business. Our solution is focusing on e-learning and knowledge transfer".

Thank you for your interest.

Robert Rothenberger
Owner
Rothenberger Global Training Solutions

Net, net while their help and instructions are limited and they do not see the Internet TV (ITV) market as their focus, it is still a free transcoder and useful as another solution for creating Flash files and the output quality is certainly good enough for most on-line video posting.

At the bottom of their page, they suggest a donation to keep the Encoder free -- I think that is fair and I will contribute...