Weird Sorenson Squeeze problem...

We've been using Sorenson Squeeze 4.2 and 4.3 for some time now and had no problems, but all the sudden it's started behaving oddly.

We set it up to watch a folder, and encode from .avi to WM9 at 720x480, 1Mbps, 2 pass constrained.

It seems to encode shorter clips (preview length, 30 secs to 2 mins) with no problem, but recently it has been choking on regular length scenes (8-15 minutes). It acts like it's encoding them OK, meaning it takes an hour or so, but when it finishes, the resulting file is maybe 10k or 50k or something and is not playable.

The problem occurs on multiple machines with different processors, and the same file will fail multiple times if multiple attempts are made.

The source .avi appears to be fine and plays properly all the way through in WMP or any other media player.

The clip will encode properly if I use Adobe Media Encoder, but it both takes longer and makes larger files.

The only change I can think of that we've made is going from Premiere Pro 1.5 to Premiere Pro 2.0.

Any ideas what might be happening?

I heard of this problem with .AVI files Chip. It turned out they were divx encoded AVIs.

Im no video expert, but i would guess its something to do with a .AVI encoding that sorenson isnt happy with.

Thanks for that! We did recently install something that also installed a Divx codec, so perhaps somehow that replaced the standard AVI codec. I will definitely check it out!!

Sorenson will even admit that they know it's an issue if the file size is too large. The process will simply time out and crash. When we talked to them they pretty much admitted that they knew about it and (in essence) hadn't thought anyone would be doing files that large. (This was some time ago and perhaps newer updates have fixed this issue, just letting you know we had this problem).